I used to hate chores. Obsessed with imagining and creating, I had no patience for fixing or maintaining things. I’ve also been close to those equally obsessed with fixing, so much that they seldom experience anything new. Or so I thought. In many ways, I really had no use for the earthly life. Early on, I was a naïve mystic. Sensing grand moments of vision in which the vibrancy of the Infinite would blow through the veils of appearance, I only wanted to live on the other side.

But fifteen years of living, from my awakening as a poet to nearly dying of cancer, has made it clear that the duality between appearance and truth existed in me. The ephemeral quality of the Infinite was the result of my inability to see and feel its constancy. Clearly my eyes have been rearranged, for now I find the Infinite in everything. It’s as if what matters has rooted itself behind my eyes, my mind, and my heart. Accepting this, I am budding as my sense of joy is taking root.

The wonder of being transformed is that we get to live more completely, more fully, within one’s self. I’ve come to understand God as the force of Spirit that like the sun makes us grow into who we are, no matter what we have to go through. And just as the world perceived by a fetus does not change, though what it senses changes dramatically the more it grows, so too we, as we form new eyes, are born, first open them, and finally see. Once on the other side of such awakening, it’s clear that the nature of the Universe remains the same. Clearly, I’ve become more integrated, forming new eyes. Clearly, my spirit has more thoroughly joined my body, birthing a different me. Clearly, my essence has melted more completely into the ordinary fact of my days.

My fantasies of God, once pure and directive, have melted, soaking like water into the even more glorious dirt. More glorious, because the Unity and Power of Life is enlivening this Earth. More glorious, because such Oneness defies the false separation of ideas from experience. More glorious, because such Wholeness defies the refuge of transcendence by which the fragile and the holy try to remove themselves from the abundance of what is, which is God animating the world.

So now I do the chores I used to hate, disliking them from the outside until my involvement takes me into the pure motion of my body lifting and holding the things of this world. My involvement takes me beneath the silhouette of mind that knows the task as a chore, in much the same way that saying the word wind long enough strips it of all familiarity. In this way, I do the chores slowly with full attention: tinkering, maintaining, fixing—doing all the things I vowed I wouldn’t.