Service Therapy

After moving four times in the last year, once just across town, once across the country, and twice across the Atlantic ocean, I have somehow begun to feel a bit uprooted. (note: that’s sarcasm)

In fact, I have felt very uprooted, or – as I prefer to put it, unanchored, caught up too much in the stormy seas of life. However, I see with great gratitude that every time I seemed perilously near rocky shores, some dear friend (too many to name) would step into my life, in some small way or perhaps a very large one, to keep me on course. 84,000 thank yous to each of you.

Now I’m back in Montana, where the mountains seem to cradle, to keep storms safely at bay. As a dear friend recently warned me, coming back to Montana isn’t going to take away all of life’s problems. And I know that. The seas of life will be stormy wherever we go. This is, after all, samsara, where cycles of greed, aversion, and delusion churn ever so slightly beneath the surface, ready always for the opportunity to pop into our lives as suffering. However, there are still places we can go to where we can get perspective, where we can drop anchor and ride those waves with grace.

Today I took one step toward living a more anchored life here in Montana: I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. I actually tagged along with my mother and some of her coworkers for a day of ‘mudding’ the walls of a newly constructed home. This week has been “Women Build” week at the house, so I had the pleasure of being the sole male volunteer (they joked that they had to take a vote about whether to let me on the site at all, but I got in).

The simple act of service, of seeing others give of themselves, and seeing the good that follows is such a beautiful part of life. Caught up in the minutia of daily life, we tend – as individuals and as a society – to become incredibly narcissistic and self-centered. We build ever more secure walls around ourselves, physically and emotionally, cutting ourselves off from life itself. I speak from plenty of first-hand experience! Sometimes we forget that the walls are, and always have been, of our own making.

So, we have to “get out of our own head” a bit – do something fun, play a bit, help someone. It took me about half the day – to let go of conversations in my head, to let go of past and future, to simply be in the process of helping. But when it happened, it felt good. After the day’s work several of us went out for a celebratory beer, despite being utterly exhausted. Entering the brewhouse, covered in white mud and dust, a sense of community overtook our exhausted separate selves and lightened our hearts. We toasted, drank, told stories, joked around, and simply smiled.