︎ zazen bozo ︎


︎︎︎ May 7th, 2023 ︎︎︎




I wasn’t too sore this morning. 
I didn’t wake up early, but I didn’t sleep in, either. 
I replanted an apple tree, a plum, and some elderberry, but I got tired part of the way through and stopped. 
On a walk I saw another stone I’d like to bring back to the property: a beautiful white quartz revealed by a land slide when the ground softened. I don’t think it’ll require the sledge, a two-person sling should do the trick. It’ll still be a bear, I’m sure. 

The phrase “boys will be boys” is often used to defend some fairly heinous stuff, but I think it’s really meant to describe monomaniacal projects like moving a 400lb rock a quarter of a mile through a steep valley, or a 200lb rock out of a brook.
It was such a pleasure to get swept up in that project yesterday, and to anticipate doing so again in a week or two. 

I’ll have to modify the sledge to have handholds, but that’s part of the fun. Estimating the stone and conceiving of how to move it all that way, then building the simple machines to do it from scratch was nearly my favorite part of the whole process. 

The simple sweat of it, the time in the woods with not even a wristwatch, that probably the Favorite with a capital F.

So sacred did that little curling path feel then, that when a few people from a simultaneous party on the hill showed up to say hi, I felt like they had trespassed a religious rite or holy place.
The making of holy moments across this property is something that keeps happening. From schlepping that stone with Jack to staring out my window at Abby, pregnant, digging a hole for an elderberry bush, it just keeps happening. Every day feels like a rite, and I think that’s really how it ought to be. 
Why didn’t it feel like that in Burlington, I wonder.
There’s less room for people there, it’s all city works and back yards and permits. Here you can be struck with the idea and be doing it before you know what’s what, and there’s things to discover and unpack and drag up hills or down them. 

Bozo