Chop Wood, Carry Water

The Buddha says, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

I was ill before I became a patient. I was a mother before I had a baby to care for. I was a wife before I had a husband. Every part of me is in a time loop, living callbacks and flash-forwards, wondering which parts of me will be called on in the next loop, coming to a fruition I neither seeded nor will harvest.

Chop wood, carry water.

I had to become a child to understand the powerlessness of adulthood. I had to become an adult to understand the losses of old age. If I’m lucky, I’ll reach old age so that I can understand more of the degradation of childhood. Reincarnation is the only consolation I have that I probably won’t see actual old age. I was ill before I became a patient, after all. Around and around I go.

Chop wood, carry water.

Everything I learn takes me deeper. I actually said the words “what was she wearing” once. I also once said, “All lives matter,” and once told a Navajo woman that the drinking problems of her people were their own fault. Others have kept teaching me even as I’ve learned how wrong I am, even as I continue to learn how badly I’ve failed to help them. I’ve learned that the people who teach have traveled territory I will never see—and that I should shut up and listen.

Chop wood, carry water.

I used to say, “I’m a writer. As long as nothing fucks with my hands, my eyes, or my brain, I can lose the rest and be fine.” So I got carpal tunnel, and cancer in my eye. Now multiple sclerosis is burning holes in my brain. And I’ve discovered I can’t lose the rest and be fine. I’ve already lost so much, leaving pieces of me by the wayside like wreckage. My strength, my memory, my equanimity, all the things people have relied on me for are gone. The few people left to help me are failing, too, in body, in mind, and in spirit, as the weight of a culture revealed and indicted becomes too much.

Chop wood, carry water.

It’s as if the whole world has been listening to every stupid thing I’ve ever said and done, so it could better hand me each lesson custom-made to blow up in my face. I live in terror of the shit I’ve said, and of the day the karma comes back. I once said “all lives matter,” and now I’ve got a kid who’s trans. The whole country is passing legislation aimed at my child. At least it’s not guns. Yet. But in-person school starts in the fall, so who knows?

Chop wood, carry water.

We have parties to convince ourselves, for a short while, that our lives are worth celebrating...that we can be our own heroes...that the better things we strive for are within reach because we can envision them. But I’ve been the person setting up the chairs before the party, and I’ve been the person cleaning the puke off the rug after everyone’s left, and I can tell you the party serves no purpose other than to let those who are in life’s eddies ignore the fact that someday they’ll be caught in the savage current. It will someday be their turn to see the end of the party...and they’ll be alone, too. The puke they’ll be cleaning off the rug will be theirs.

Chop wood, carry water.

I’ve done the fundraisers, the letter-writing campaigns, the bake sales. I did the walk for cancer decades before I became a patient. Like an asshole I stayed for the caregivers’ walk—the last lap of the last morning, when all the eddy-dwellers have already had their party and gone home because the night was too long and the work too grim and the fur in their mouths got nasty. I stayed thinking I was honoring my mom, who was my grandfather’s caregiver. Now, all these decades later, I know the last lap isn’t the caregivers. It’s the patients, who keep walking that last lap into the future until they can’t walk anymore. The caregivers can stop caring and move on. They can go back to the eddies. The patients never will. The last thing we will see is the chopping of wood and the carrying of water.

Chop.