Housework Haiku

Rain turns red blue flags
into streaks of liquid color -
prayers fly free.

Looking out over the backyard through a rain-streaked window and screen, the cool wind comes in from the tiny slits we can leave open where the rain won't leak. It's a beautiful morning - stormy, cool, and the blue sky is on its way. To my right is our sink - not yet operating, but subject of hours of conversation, action and emotion last night. House projects, it turns out, are very hard for both of us - we've put off installing this sink that we were both so happy to purchase, because we both dread doing wrong - the wrong hole, wrong place, the wrong pipes that leak. We've done errors before - all remediable, but somehow they often go unspoken, undiscussed. Last night some of them burst free, frustrations with the paint job I never touched up though I promised to, the way that Dylan moves furniture first before dealing with more complicated but also more frustrating and longer-lasting issues. Avoidance. In the intimate space of marriage, things can't go avoided for long.

"Why is it that on such important occasions - New Years, Anniversaries, etc - I get so upset? It all seems to build up and then burst out when the stakes are high."

"Well," I replied, "you've just answered your own question. The stakes are high." Personally, I've never done New Years or holidays well, either. All the old garbage drums out, sets its own stakes into the relative peace and celebration of the day. Raining on the parade, it seems.

But what is the parade without rebellion? In doing Hakomi, in working with writing practice, in meditation, I have tried to more deeply feel that which I already intellectually have been taught - resistance is where the juice is. the power locked inside our denial, internal subfertuge. When that thunder claps and cancels a Miksang shoot, like today, maybe it is bringing just the space we need. When one of us cries, can't cut a hole, gets scared to discuss our feelings, and they burst forth anyway, that's space - space being released. It isn't a burden, it isn't a blurring, it's an opening, as painful as it is.

In order to hear the beat, there has to be a not beat. In order to see the red, there has to be blue or some other color or non-color. Contrast is key. Life cannot be all one shade of happy or angry. And eventually, the sink needs to be put in so the water can flow free. But in order for that to happen, some water has to leave our eyes, too. So be it.

Putting in the sink,
we flinch at the saw sound.
Who wants to hear a cut heart?