Construction

My days at the moment are wall-to-wall construction work. I'm not building per se but I am surrounded by builders.

I am speaking ten times more than usual, despite being a professional speaker, and I am doing so over electric drills, angle grinders, and hammers.

I am competing for a voice with loud labourers, fighting to be heard above foremen. My phone rings all day, often when I am busy with dusty decisions about finishes, cupboards, placements and payments.

This home renovation is a full-time, hardcore, hands-on business.

Yet it is a spiritual experience. The worldly is no less spiritual than the other worldly. They are one, two sides of the same mystery.

Each takes you into yourself, one indirectly and the other more obviously. It's easy to be meditative in the mountains, can you do it with a jackhammer down the hall?

Can you access the eternal, and love humanity, when twelve apostles of bricks and mortar are rearranging your sanctuary? That is the test!

I have often felt like I am failing it, or at least spending round after endless round against the ropes. But if you aren't being boxed, you might just be in a comfort zone.

Love is a verb, awakening is a hard, cold noun.

Today I did and did and did, and while I was driving back from a supplier, I had this burst of elated ecstasy that felt like a shard of sunshine from behind a rich rain cloud.

Of course, it disappeared again but I kept driving.

Synchronistically, the glazier asked me about what I do and then said that meeting me made amazing sense. He wanted to go to the Himalayas and I said that the construction site was as enlightening. Life is not an 'either/or', it is an 'and'.

You are the ultimate 'and'.