Читать книгу The Barn at the End of the World - Mary Rose O'Reilley - Страница 27

Sweeping

I HAD DRIVEN THROUGH another thunderstorm blown up out of the relentless humidity, sheets of water flooding into the north end of the barn as I arrived. The outdoor sheep were lurking in their sheds, looking like extras from a Christmas crèche. Even Butthead, even the ever starving Polypay ewes, seemed subdued as I rationed out corn and soybean mix and freshened the hay. The ewe lambs in the pasture get thirty-two pounds of corn divided between two metal feeders, but the feeders were full of water. I couldn’t dump it all out; I wasn’t strong enough to lift the bunks, so the sheep had to tough each other out at one feeder.

Frost, the barn cat, came along for a ride on the hay cart as I worked inside. She is a focused killer who regularly swipes birds out of the air.

Sweeping the floor is one of my chores.

This is how it went: first, the broom annoyed me and I began to analyze and comment to myself on its nasty plastic American uselessness. Next, I began to fantasize how a good old-fashioned broom would sweep that barn clean. I carefully considered the possibility of getting psittacosis from the dust of pigeon shit. I lamented that seventy feet of the barn remained to be swept. A third of the way into the task, as about a third of the way into a Zen session, I thought I would have to quit or snap: that is the edge you always have to lean against. Then I began to get into a rhythm and a swish of sound that pleased me, and at the same time I became more efficient. Halfway down the barn rose another temptation to get off the zafu: I’m tired, fifty feet is enough, my shoulders ache, it doesn’t look any cleaner than when I started, why am I doing this? I could be cooking dinner, playing music. Does this even need to be done?

I lean on my rotten broom and think: I am paying good money to sweep this barn with a lousy broom. I have paid eighty dollars in tuition for an independent study in animal science, much as I might pay eighty dollars at the Zen Center to experience the discipline of silence and manual work, to clear my mind of ideas, most of them wrong. The silence, now the rain has stopped, is worth the tuition. Pacified by hay, water, and corn, the animals are lying down and breathing as calmly as bodhisattvas.

I go back to my broom. How Ben would laugh at my inexorable patient sweeping. I have not earned much in my life, but I have earned this work, the right to sweep patiently.

Thus I thought while trying to let go of thought, and then for one sweep of the broom I was not thinking.