In Between
Booker T. Washington National Historic Site
For the past several days I have been doing some traveling, driving around visiting national parks and historic sites. First on my list of places was Booker T. Washington’s birth and boyhood home in Virginia. Most of the buildings present today are recreations of destroyed original buildings.
Several of the buildings were of log construction. Log construction produces some very substantial structures. For all of their strength the do have a definite lack of ability to keep out the weather, unless you fill the cracks with something. This really isn’t unique to log construction. Even today with modern materials there needs to be some sort of filler to seal up cracks.
As we live our lives we are able to identify major events and activities. We use these to get a sense of the quality of our lives. Yet there is a lot to be said for how we live in the spaces between those bigger moments. While it is true that large portions of our lives are taken up doing things like work, sleep, cooking, cleaning, and the countless other chores and obligations, it is also true that there are large quantities of time spent doing smaller more mundane and less memorable things.
We could think of our daily practice, chanting, sutra reciting, or meditation, as the foundation upon which we build our lives. The large memorable activities are similar to the logs. All of that is important. It might be easy to see that we need to act as good Buddhists when we are working, or out in public shopping and such, or as we interact with our families. But what about the seemingly insignificant transition moments; those times in between?
“The buildings were in decay, the fences and walls corrupt, the bases of the pillars rotten, and the beams and ridgepoles tilting and slanted.” (Lotus Sutra, Chapter III)
If we ignore the mud between the logs we will expose the inside of the building to the environment and we won’t have a comfortable structure. So too with our lives, if we ignore the transitional times, the spaces between, then we are making it more difficult to actually manifest our enlightened life when it really shows.
“The people of that world will live in buildings of wonderful treasures.” (Lotus Sutra, Chapter VI)
Think for a moment of a time when you have been upset or sad, or angry at the conclusion of one activity only to find that as you began the next activity it had a negative impact. Or imagine you are day dreaming and something interrupts you causing a difficulty in refocusing. The connecting moments, the gaps between events, the space between activities has an important role and influence on the larger events. They may not seem noteworthy, but they are important.
“My disciples are performing the Bodhisattva practices secretly though they show themselves in the form of Sravakas. They are purifying my world though they pretend to want little and to shun birth-and-death.” (Lotus sutra, Chapter VIII)
