365 True Things: 17/Doing

"Do All You Can" linocut
Anna Oneglia 2005

The last time I was at Tassajara Zen Center, tucked far back in a cool canyon among the chaparral-covered hills of Monterey County, I bought this postcard. I liked its message: Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are. So many facets for contemplation.

Now I move the card around the house with me, so I'll see it. Lately it's been propped under the TV-on-the-bedroom-wall. It reminds me of a few things: most vexingly, of the many interests I have and how there's not enough time for everything, or even most things; of the peaceful oasis of Tassajara with its zendo, and the practice of meditation that I am so very bad at. It also, sometimes, reminds me to water the garden.

The fact that the card is under the TV isn't significant. I just see it there. Lately I've been working at the kitchen counter, facing across the kitchen and out the window. As a little poem I wrote this morning (while avoiding work-work) describes:

From where I sit

Crumbs on the countertop
butter to be put away
dishes too.
Out the window, ruffling shadows.
A junco flits to the wire, pauses, flits up and away.
Spider floats, silver, on trembling thread of gossamer.

So putting the card in my office, say, wouldn't do me much good. And there's no convenient place to prop it on the kitchen counter. But the bookcase around and under the TV I see all the time. And when, one of these days, I migrate back into my office, the card will come with me. I find it soothing. Rooting.

I could detail everything I MIGHT be doing currently, but just thinking about it exhausts me. I've got a master list with all the possibilities, and from that I try to choose a few things every day. At the moment, my daily list basically comprises work (two jobs in), plus an on-line poetry class (hence the above poem: legitimate work!), this blog (commitment to self), doing a bit of research for my fiction project about the Japanese concentration camps, and walking the dog. Today, too, my little group of three "questers" is coming and we will discuss a reading ("Desiderata": that's right, "Go placidly amid the noise and haste," which now that I think about it is more or less the same message as Nkosi Johnson's).

When I sat down to do this just now, I thought I might write about Tassajara, or meditation—or, for that matter, about what I have, and the time I have, and the place I am—but I'll leave those for other days. (It's nice to know I have plenty to muse on in this project.) For now, I'd best get back to doing my work.