By dinner time I was done and dog-tired from the effort but it felt good to have accomplished that much. We tend to think of these activities or even our daily work as ‘ordinary life’ and that they are. But they are also a whole lot more. The everyday practices of being home with little children or a full day at the office, eight hours behind the wheel of a truck or renovating someone’s kitchen, all these daily tasks add up to a life and in fact they can be a very rich life. In her book An Alter in the World: A Geography of Faith Barbara Brown Taylor expresses it this way. “To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger — these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life."
Today I'll put the finishing touches on the pig pen. The pigs are going to love being warm and dry as it gets colder and wetter this fall. They have their own way of showing gratitude and the bodily practice I feel in my bones right now, like water on stone, is doing its work in me.