cooper

Bronze Okimono by Toyoaki , ca 1885

Barrel maker planes staves to exact angles.
His shavings glow in the afternoon sun.
He joins fragrant wood together,
Fitting shoulders like building an arch.
Until the bands, there is no barrel.

There is no barrel until the cooper builds it. Until then, there are pieces of straight-grained wood, shavings, a round bottom, and metal bands, but there is no barrel. All parts are there, but they need to be composed in order to take shape. It is the same with the facets of our personalities. Until they are held tightly together as a single unit, there is no completeness, and usefulness will not be forthcoming.

Spiritual practice can be the outside order that the personality needs. While such an order can be initially restricting, perhaps even feel artificial in its arbitrariness, it is absolutely necessary. It is a means to an end. Perhaps at the end we will not need such structure, but neither will we reach the end without the means. Before we leave the image of the barrel, there is one more thing to notice about it. A barrel encloses only one thing : void. That is the way it is with us, too. All the pieces of our personality, no matter how perfectly formed, only enclose what is inside us. All spiritual practice, while it may bind us into a cohesive whole, points to the emptiness of the center. This emptiness is not nihilism but the open possibility for Tao to enter. Only with such space will we have peace.

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao

I’ve spent a lot of my time the last few weeks creating empty space. We cleared out all the bedrooms for new carpeting, rebuilt a couple of walls that had molded due to a leaking door, fixed the door, painted rooms and ceilings, and finally, had three lovely empty rooms with brand new carpeting and paint. Ah. Such a lovely feeling of empty space!

Of course they are now all being filled up again with our stuff, and the kids rooms are a mess while they figure out where everything will go. But the kids rearranged their rooms and we created some new empty space for them, and less furniture is coming back into the rooms than left so there is more open space in all the bedrooms now. My youngest decided to ditch his bed and just have his mattress on the floor, so his room looks bigger. They’ve both ditched their dressers in favor of a smaller storage bin arrangement. Well they are teenagers so permanence isn’t an issue for their furniture, anyway. In our room a bookcase is coming out, but makes way for our dresser to emerge from the closet, freeing space in the closet.

So that is a way of dealing with physical space. But how do we clear out our mental space, to make way for the Tao to flow more freely? My own way is through these meditations I do each day, clearing my thoughts, making space for a small bit of thinking about life as a whole rather than in isolated bits and pieces. I wander through my garden and see what new thing is growing, what needs to be trimmed back a bit, what needs more water or a bit of attention, and find my mind has calmed. I don’t really think of these things I do as a spiritual practice, but they are about as close to one as I get these days.

I spent my Sundays in church as a kid, and found it didn’t add a lot to my life, really. I have tried a couple of times as an adult to go to churches and found much the same. The saying of “You are nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on the earth” holds more truth for me. That is where I feel spiritual, happy, at home and at peace with the world. People think my garden must take a lot of work, but to me it is a pleasure and not a chore at all.

I think a fine craftsman finds much the same thing. The cooper or craftsman who knows their craft well finds the pleasure in doing the work, and it is truly art for them and not a chore. When I wrote software, there was a very zen-like feeling in getting into the flow of coding, re-working the lines of code until they achieved a state of perfection. It was my own perfectionistic nature at that time that made it a pleasure to do the work.

There is a pleasure in doing things well, in knowing the barrel you’ve created holds water or wine or whatever without leaking, or in knowing you’ve created a space where things can grow or where people can live their lives in a wonderful space you’ve created for them. There is a pleasure in crafting a fine product, or any kind of lasting work. It’s worth taking the time to do things well, and worth taking the time to make space in your life both physically and mentally in order to renew yourself.