By George Lundgren, Becketwood Member
I washed the dishes and the kitchen sink today. Always a treat. The white porcelain shines. The drain is dull with brass showing through the worn chrome. It reminds me of our Queens, NY sink, mom’s dependable cleaning, and Mom washing the kitchen floor on her knees crying. “I’m losing my brains,” she confesses. Mom, a smart one, notices at forty she is not as sharp as she was. I reassure her, “Mom, you’re okay.” She says no more. Thirty years later I understand her tears and admit to the slow shredding of “self” as my gray matter thins.
The worn metal also reminds me of the tracks for the “boats” of Tungsten ore we pushed in and out of the blast furnaces, of the sweaty workers waiting for coffee breaks, lunches, and quitting time. I see gray industrial buildings where other men still build ships, guns, tanks, connect pipes, repair cars, make the world work, and “know that smell of metal.”
When I squeeze out my favorite “Frasier Fir” dish soap, I am six years old stepping out of our 1950 gray Studebaker on the side of a mountain in New Hampshire and being overwhelmed by my first exposure to a pine forest. I am transported back through space and time to enjoy that heavenly smell again and again with each squeeze. The hot water feels sinfully good on my arthritic hands. I adjust its temperature to “just right” with the hot and cold handles, the magic wands of the kitchen.
In 1969 the book Zen Rocks, Zen Waters let me see water as an ongoing miracle to be aware of and to enjoy every moment. The beauty of its surfaces and forms, its drips, trickles, ripples, waves, splashes, and reflections beat Heinz’s 57 varieties by 100,000. I hear a stream, a waterfall, and the waves crashing on the shore. I drop a glass into the water and hear the sound of the water swallowing me as I cannon-ball off the dock, ger-ker-SPLUNK.
In Malawi, Africa, I watched women carry jugs of muddy, parasite infested water on their heads up the two miles from the river. I am grateful for the privilege to play in safe crystal-clear clean water delivered to my kitchen. Soap bubbles crown the show: geometry made real, perfect spheres that respond to wind, gravity, and other forces. As an encore I feel the bubble’s “angel kisses” and enjoy their ever colorful and changing light show.
Enjoying water in the moment frees my silly mind from its incessant thinking, ruminating and worrying. Splish-splash I was takin’ a ….
