From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

This morning we danced around kitchen, sang made up songs, and drank coffee together over a close—if slightly overly-serious—conversation. At church, a man stood in front of the pulpit speaking of the equilibrium between desire and acceptance, between the striving, and the stillness of gratitude. I kept thinking about the abstraction of language, of the context of the conversations. Over brunch we all talked about being being in the world versus talking about being in the world.

Afterwards, as I was outside digging in the ground, my mind kept drifting to that dichotomy, to why my mind thinks it's a dichotomy—being in the world and thinking about being in the world. Action or thought. We live in a culture, don't we, that creates that conceptual rift. A philosopher is one whose head is in the clouds and can't see his feet on the ground. In a film about Derrida I watched recently, he refers to the joke of the philosopher who falls in the well while looking at the stars. It's a nearly unchallenged assumption. The thinkers can't be concrete, the doers can't really stop and think.

Why do we split these ways of being so divisively? Or is it just me? When immersed in thinking, doing seems a threat. The inverse is also true; immersed in doing, thinking too deeply seems to threaten the action.

But I think we can have both. I think we can be in the world and think deeply about how we choose to do so. So I try—at least for today. Today I spent my afternoon digging in the dirt, a piece of my early evening philosophizing about it, and next we will go join hands in solidarity, to literally, physically, stand on the side of love. Because, for me, the doing of it matters. I can send my heart out any day of the week, and I do, but sometimes, sometimes I've got to use my body.