ON CONTENTMENT   -  archives

Nothing like gazing upon your own well-stacked cords of firewood turning golden in the evening sun to get you feeling contented, and then in that contentment set you to thinking about contentment itself and how it arises, where it goes and what it is exactly, what is it made of, is it part of you or is it more like a shaft of sunlight warming a patch of earth? Firewood, another form of light, serves in so many ways...

That thought always leads to a line from the Tao Te Ching that glows with the light of the truth that cannot be pinned down, that shimmers in the mind’s eye: "There is no disaster greater than not being content."

Being content? Mere contentment? What does contentment have to do with disaster? Lao Tzu knew, and passes along the intimation, that contentment is the beginning of all that is worthy, it is the seed and germ of every happiness, its absence accordingly the tiny breach that ruptures into every disaster, the pinhole in the dam, the lost horseshoe nail. Contentment is all the rest: pride in the way of one's life and the fruit of it, whether one is shepherd or chieftain, a fact that hasn't changed since back in the tribal days when miracles were everywhere, and no museums yet needed to remind us of what is gone.

Contentment is the core of all that truly matters. It is the root of passion, the heights of honesty, the beating heart of every joy, the embrace of a family. There is no self in contentment; it is other-centered. The self-centered, in contrast, is perturbed, discordant, writhes with discontent and seeks release at every turn (insert the 'seven cardinal sins' here, for starters).

And where there is no contentment, deception is essential, falsehood is opportune, theft is advantageous, and enmity is natural. No one knew this better than the Chinese of Lao Tzu's time, who had seen it all for millennia, from battle and rapine to disease and famine, and knew well the silent, dry seed of the whirlwind that springs from the ash of contentment...

SUN MUSIC

Out in the colding late afternoon air, the mood of snow looming on the shoulders of the mountains, I’m loading up another wheelbarrow with firewood so we’ll have some nice warm nights, my work filling the air with the ringing music of well-dried sunlight.

That golden orb up there does have a direct connection with music as played on a marimba, a crude one, much like the first one ever made-- in this firewoody fashion, I suspect, the different lengths and thicknesses of the wood making a basic kind of music to the ear that has to do with heat, the music of solid sunlight, it’s a song about warmth and contentment (they go hand in hand), with lyrics about being beside a warm stove. (Whose fuel you had a part in creating!)

Which reminds me of my discovery in re the difficulty I’ve always had in describing the basic pleasure of a wood stove, saying to centrally and otherly heated folks that a wood heater is the most wonderful warmth to stand next to, its not like standing before any other heater-- electric ones get too hot, burn your clothes, fossil fuel ones are too thermostatty and vaguely dissipated, with their fluxy ventrush of god-its-hot-in-hereness; a straight up fire itself, as in the woods, is too focusedly hot, burn your clothes like an electric heater and so on, I just could never describe the way in which it was soulfully pleasant to be beside a woodstove, as winter guests of ours find when they gravitate toward the stove and stand or eventually lie down there with smiles on their faces, sometimes even saying Oooh this feels so good I don’t want to go home...

It’s not like dipping into an onsen either… I finally realized what it was-- of course! It's like being chilled with winter cold and suddenly being able to stand in strong summer sunlight: that deep, ancient, bone-warming comfort that our unending selves know so well as a kind of mother love. For what is radiating from that stove is sunlight, coming to life again after living through trees, then turning into the music that is playing even now, as I work into the darkness.