Chop Wood - Carry Water
The year was 1972 and I had recently been promoted to the position of branch manager of the General Adjusting Bureau and reassigned to the office in Virginia, Minnesota. For nearly a year I commuted each day from my home in Duluth, a sixty-mile trip of an hour each way. I had not been offered any assistance with moving and with each passing day I became increasingly discouraged by these new circumstances.
During this time, I began to sense that I did not feel comfortable climbing upward on the corporate ladder as it seemed to represent conformity to the world, and I was feeling the need to go in an entirely different direction. I was 32 years old, and my wife Judy and I had two small daughters, Kari and Beth. I didn't know which direction I should take, and we were open to all possibilities.
One day in early 1973 I was browsing in a bookstore in downtown Duluth when I came across a book titled. "What Do You Do Till The Buddha Comes – Chop Wood, Carry Water". In that moment I decided that my future fate should be in a totally new direction. After much thinking, I decided to take up the way of the Buddha. I then quit my job, and we sold our house in an upscale neighborhood and with the profits, we purchased the old farmhouse from my grandparents where I had been raised as a young boy. This was a life-changing decision where I decided to take a vacation from the modern world and explore the world of beauty and the slow life of the natural world.
For one year I grew much of our food in a large garden that I watered by carrying water from a small brook a block away from our house. I also purchased a chainsaw and manual wood splitter that I used to saw and split eight cords of wood for the upcoming winter. This was a quiet year of inner reflection where I became immersed in the music of Vivaldi and quiet contemplation. After a year had elapsed, I was offered a new job as an adjuster and returned to the world with an entirely new perspective on work and life.
On my path, I became a student of Aurelius who is still regarded the greatest stoic philosopher to have ever lived. He shows us that on our lives paths we will encounter many obstacles. It is how we define these obstacles that is up to us and we can see them as either problems or as opportunities. When we learn to see life’s obstacles as opportunities, we learn to employ them as virtues such as truth and creativity to solve them and create a better world.
And now my journey has brought me to the small town of New Ulm in southern Minnesota where I now reside with my little cat Sophie as I do some writing of articles, poetry, and my memoirs. So now, my Chop Wood and Carry Water journey has evolved into a more spiritual quest where I spend my days reading and contemplating the fundamental nature of reality and the divine.