On the first warmsun morning of Portland’s current monsoon spring, I climbed a ladder up to a roof more than two hundred times, rebuilding a friend’s office on the second floor: upmeasure.downcut.upmeasure.downcut. In the afternoon, as the first sensations of sunburn began to sizzle my shoulders, I was halfway down the ladder, descending it like a staircase, when I heard a calm, familiar voice say, “this is your life.”
My mind paused; my feet continued toward the earth. I looked around. No one present had spoken. As I powered up the table saw, I felt a little more awake than before. I tend to appreciate these moments, especially when working with fast, sharp blades. This time, however, even as the screaming saw ripped through another work piece, I noticed that something tense within me had relaxed.
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It would be redundant to say that returning to work after baby arrived has been a challenge. The practice of woodworking is inherently challenging; it requires a degree of presence, awareness, and consideration that I’ve worked to cultivate for many years. When I’m not showing up in my whole self, the feedback is often immediate, and sometimes expensive. Something about that works for me, and has for a long time.
The deeper work has been in viscerally realizing how the portal into fatherhood has changed me. With regards to work, I can feel the Finish Carpenter part of me beginning to die—which is a little scary, because that guy is making all of our money right now. But it also begs the question: what’s next?
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Every day, sometime between our morning walk and when I leave for work, my son gazes at me with unwavering contact. He has no inhibitions about staying in connection for as long as it feels right. In those moments, I know that he is learning how to be in the world, absorbing my being-ness, and seeing me with more clarity and openness than I have ever experienced before.
The first time I experienced his eye contact for more than a few seconds, I nearly left the room. Up to that moment, he had been a kind of etheric spirit creature to whom I gave but from whom I had not received much in the human realm. The wisdom that infants live in a state of superconnection did not escape me: any tension or activation I am feeling, he is also experiencing in a felt, embodied state. Put another way, he experiences himself wholly as my stress happening. Instead of leaving the room, I chose to stay with him, and—for a few minutes—let go of any need to do anything else.
This four-and-a-half month old boycreature is my Why now. He is the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, as Dylan Thomas once wrote. It feels easier than ever to move toward the most right thing. There is no more made-up mission statement written on a scrap of paper at a men’s gathering that I’m supposed to keep referring to in order to affirm that I’m living to my highest potential. The mission is clear: help to raise this new earthling in a good way. Teach through being.
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When I was reminded that that one flash of a moment was indeed the life that I had built, I could not but feel the energetic drain of my work situation: running a carpentry business but mostly just being its employee, hauling so many tools around town for each project, exacerbating the decimation of old growth fir forests from the remote corners of B.C. My heart sunk. Having just retired from 13 years of commercial fishing (in fact, the salmon will arrive en masse to Bristol Bay any day now, and my heart aches also to be so far from that land), I acknowledge the extent of my participation in the harvesting of natural resources, however “sustainable.”
I am so tired of killing things, and profitting from death.
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The path is so clear for me that it doesn’t even feel like a choice. The beautiful thing is that I am free, and would rather do nothing else.
All of that, and the specific content of that path is still forming. Like the surface-level minutiae of life itself, the what will adjust as the how re-calibrates. If that sounds a little abstract, I’m just starting to get what it is to be a father, and the learning curve is taking me for a wild ride.