Lessons from the other

There are two sorts of perfect weather. One kind is when the elements align and the boundaries between outside and inside fall away. You know those days: perfect humidity, temperature, light and air movement, as if your thermostat were controlling the whole outdoors. Inside, outside, it all feels the same. It is almost too familiar, too nature-mimics-home to be fully appreciated.

The other kind is stunning: fresh, cool at times, occasionally breezy, high 60s tipping over into the low 70s, bright but not blinding, clear, clean, alive. More brilliant and vibrant than any indoor climate can ever be. That was the kind of weather we had today.

It was hard to think of anything but nature, hard to do anything but be swept up in the gift of the earth. I was lured outside for three hours, tending to my woodpiles: gathering, sawing, hauling, arranging, stacking when I should have been working on any one of a number of presentations I have to give in the next 10 days, or cooking for the next onslaught of holiday meals.

Instead, I was outside. It was totally meditative; totally absorbing. It wasn't exactly that elusive, transporting moment of "flow" that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about. It couldn't have been. The bucksaw that my dear friend, George, my geologist, loaned us kept seizing when deep in the sappy, green pine limbs I was cutting.

George had come by Friday to help us with our yard work. He graciously brought his saw and cutters and a small arsenal of tools with him. As I sawed, he held one end of the limb, opening the cut so that the saw had the room it needed to move freely. Without his leverage, sawing was much more tedious.

Still, the wood, like George, was a patient teacher. The more it resisted, the more it forced me to devise a strategy that would serve both our needs, its and mine. With a chainsaw, I could have used force, but without it, the wood and I had to negotiate. And it was in these moments of resistance, when I needed to mind the needs of the other, when success lay only in understanding the ways of other, that I learned, and grew, the most.

Have a joyous end of Pesah.