Digging Ditches, and other spiritual experiences

I’ve taken great pleasure, in the last few weeks, in doing hard physical labor - using a digging bar and a post hole digger to make a deep hole in the ground. The four-foot wide hole goes down three and a half feet, and the narrow post-hole dug one extends an additional four feet down. The last six feet of the excavation is through hardpan - a compacted mixture of clay and sand and rock which needs to be speared with the heavy digging stick to break apart. After the hole got too deep to allow for effective swinging with a shovel, I climbed in and used my hands to fill a bucket, which I would stand up to dump outside the hole. When going deeper down with the post-hole digger, I would pull the dirt up and dump it into the bucket in the bottom of the deep hole. When the bucket was full, I would dump it.

There’s a tangible substance to the satisfaction of the work. Part of it is made of doing something harder than what I am used to doing. Part of it is in the perseverance, and the success of actually making it happen. I feel a steady and warm light, about the size and weight of a fist, a coalescing of the reward of the work, solid inside of me. It makes me feel nourished, strong, and substantial.

I’ve started collecting things that make me feel that way. There is love,similarly solid and powerfully centering, when given freely and with no tally about how it is received. And there is honesty. Last December my friend Laurie, who was visiting from Bali, lost her wallet in a Seven Eleven parking lot. She didn’t even know she’d lost it till the man who found it contacted her. The wallet had everything in it - all her documentation for travel, all her money, her credit cards, the PIN of her debit card . . . And the man was willing to wait there until she could come for it.

I thought about what it would have felt like to be that man. I could feel how what he found in that parking lot was the precious opportunity to exercise his honesty - to reach out and make a big difference to someone. I imagine that that opportunity must have left him with a greater reward than anything that was in the wallet. I could identify with the glow - entirely independent of the gratitude he might receive from Laurie; the internal reward of acting according to his best nature.

I got to exercise my honesty a month after that. The kids behind the counter at the computer store were ready to let me go without paying for the optical drive they had just installed. I asked them twice - they said that was all, I was free to take my mac and go. (And in a way I would have liked to; I wasn’t happy about my mac burning out so soon after the warranty ended - first the hard drive then the optical drive) But I said, Are you sure? You’d better check that - I expected to pay for an optical drive. Then I waited about twenty minutes while one of them went in to talk to a supervisor. And when he came out, he charged me $236 for the optical drive - more than the price I’d been quoted, or the one that appeared on the printed receipt (which their records seemed to show I had already paid). He didn’t thank me for my honesty or for saving him from his mistake. So I didn’t get any external reward for being honest. But as I walked away with my mac, I acknowledged to myself that it was worth the price to feel the surging, centering, comforting glow of an act of honesty. A gift that had been given to me through the circumstance of their inexperience. I felt grateful to them then, and felt compassion for them and whatever mix of thoughts they had that made up their world view and life experience.

There are other things that give me that feeling. The heart-soaring response to a majestic vista, the delight of an “aha” moment, the satisfaction of creating a work of art, the warmth of being in community with others. I’m using these collected experiences to redefine my sense of substance. What if my substance is that solid, glowing feeling? What if the whole point of life is to bring out that substance? What would it mean for me to understand that I don’t need to seek out activities, or manipulate events, to experience that substance? Could I have it all the time?

At our spiritual formation group last Monday, the scripture that was shared referred to drawing water from the springs of salvation. What came to me as I listened was that the springs of salvation are made of the same substance that I’ve been collecting in my experience. I draw water from the springs of salvation when I acknowledge that this is the substance of being. I can have it right now - it’s not dependent on having any material conditions met. And if this is true for me, it’s true for everyone.