Karma Ends
Dambara and I spent the morning chipping away at our brush pile. It's huge. It's taller than me, maybe 7 feet high, about 20 feet deep and, I don't know, 40 feet long? Last spring, we hired a young man to take out some hazelnut trees that stood in the path of our planned deer fence, and he got pulled into another job before he was able to chip the wood for us. So it's waited all these weeks, patiently drying out, growing larger and larger, as we added a hefty dead tree and many, many pruned branches.
It's hard to hire help out here in the country. People are either overwhelmed keeping on top of their own to-do lists, or in great demand, or feel it's not worth their time to drive out this far in order to do the work. So, we end up doing a lot of things ourselves that would be much better undertaken by people who knew what they were doing, who had the right tools, and who had the time, which we do not.
We finally surrendered to the inevitability of Plan B (Looks Like We're Going To Do It Ourselves) for tackling the brush pile, and bought a chipper and a small, electric chain saw that was light enough for me to wield. We gathered safety glasses and protective headphones, thick gloves and water bottles, and trod up the hill where the brush pile loomed.
We've whittled away at the pile, every morning, until the heat drives us indoors. The chipper, which looked so huge when it arrived, seemed dainty when initially stationed next to the brush pile. Now, it's regaining some of its heft, as the neighboring pile diminishes, bit by bit.
We're at the icky part, where it feels like we've been doing this forever, and there's still a LONG way to go. We can see our progress, not only by our ever more dominant chipper, but by the expanse of long, green grass uncovered each day, which is happily chomped down by the llamas each evening, giving us an ever widening wedge of flat hillside on which to lop, saw, and chip.
We've already changed out a dulled blade and a damaged drive belt, so we're getting to know our friendly chipper pretty well. We remain on good terms, us and the chipper, mutually respectful. We admire the chipper's strength and endurance; the chipper responds greedily to our hands with their opposable thumbs, repeatedly cramming branches down its feed tube. It's consuming an impressive amount of branches, and producing an impressive volume of wood chips, which we're spreading around our young orchard trees to nurture and encourage all those tentative root systems.
But, as I said, we're still in the icky middle, where we cannot yet see the end of the tunnel, much less the light that must be shining somewhere up ahead. And I'm reminded of some advice that a friend gave me years ago, when I was swimming in a vast sea of dismay over a seemingly endless challenge that was simply not improving or shifting: "Karma ends."
If we keep working at the task at hand, no matter how seemingly endless, we will come to its end. If we gather the right tools, be it meditation, living in community, or a lightweight chain saw; if we summon the right attitude, be it gratitude, power, or joy; if we persevere at a pace that we can sustain over the long term, in the company of an enthusiastic partner, like-minded souls, or even in seclusion; we'll consistently make progress. We can overcome a destructive habit or an immense brush pile, learning useful strategies along the way, and finally, finally, arrive at the point where we can easily handle the next pile of pruned branches, or, the next refrain of an old habit.
Because, karma ends.
It's hard to hire help out here in the country. People are either overwhelmed keeping on top of their own to-do lists, or in great demand, or feel it's not worth their time to drive out this far in order to do the work. So, we end up doing a lot of things ourselves that would be much better undertaken by people who knew what they were doing, who had the right tools, and who had the time, which we do not.
We finally surrendered to the inevitability of Plan B (Looks Like We're Going To Do It Ourselves) for tackling the brush pile, and bought a chipper and a small, electric chain saw that was light enough for me to wield. We gathered safety glasses and protective headphones, thick gloves and water bottles, and trod up the hill where the brush pile loomed.
We've whittled away at the pile, every morning, until the heat drives us indoors. The chipper, which looked so huge when it arrived, seemed dainty when initially stationed next to the brush pile. Now, it's regaining some of its heft, as the neighboring pile diminishes, bit by bit.
We're at the icky part, where it feels like we've been doing this forever, and there's still a LONG way to go. We can see our progress, not only by our ever more dominant chipper, but by the expanse of long, green grass uncovered each day, which is happily chomped down by the llamas each evening, giving us an ever widening wedge of flat hillside on which to lop, saw, and chip.
We've already changed out a dulled blade and a damaged drive belt, so we're getting to know our friendly chipper pretty well. We remain on good terms, us and the chipper, mutually respectful. We admire the chipper's strength and endurance; the chipper responds greedily to our hands with their opposable thumbs, repeatedly cramming branches down its feed tube. It's consuming an impressive amount of branches, and producing an impressive volume of wood chips, which we're spreading around our young orchard trees to nurture and encourage all those tentative root systems.
But, as I said, we're still in the icky middle, where we cannot yet see the end of the tunnel, much less the light that must be shining somewhere up ahead. And I'm reminded of some advice that a friend gave me years ago, when I was swimming in a vast sea of dismay over a seemingly endless challenge that was simply not improving or shifting: "Karma ends."
Because, karma ends.