This is chapter 3 of an ongoing series about my time volunteering at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. Read Chapters 1 and 2.
This human body needs labor.
Needs body labor. Outside of the brain, completely out of the mind or prefrontal cortex. Free of words and description and thought.
This is the antidote to the burnout, somehow. Not more sleeping. Not more analyzing. Not another attempt at strategizing how to enjoy being alive for three more months.
I worked exclusively in my head. My body was pleading for more. My body was begging to scrub and sweep and lift and throw and clean mindlessly. Mindlessly. See that word? It is important. We’ve made mindless subordinate, but it is essential.
My muscles ached for aching. Cells knit with potential energy begged for kinetic release. Scrub and scrub and scrub. Fill up another bucket of water. Try to remember the Spanish word for bucket. Let your eyes glaze over and look through blurred vision for white and dark spots on the stone path- for more shit to clean. More dirt to scrub off the rocks. The water is dark now. All the dirt and shit. More soap, more water.
Agua. Mas agua. Always. Siempre.
Walk down to the river through three gates and dip the white 10 gallon bucket into its gushing stream. Halfway filled, otherwise it’s too heavy to carry back up the riverbed, up the hill, through three gates, to the bear enclosure where you’ll empty it immediately. Throw it on the wooden table that the bears lift their hundreds of pound bodies onto to eat their breakfast, their lunch, their dinner. Papaya and corn and watermelon; cheese and porridge and honey and granola; milk formula and a sandwich of stale bread and garlic powder. Raw eggs.
Feed them, then clean it up. Feed them, then clean it up. Feed them, then clean it up. Clean your tools. Store them. Feed yourself. Sleep. Then start again. There is no progress to make. There are no goals to work towards. There is only maintenance. There is only today. Feed the animals and clean up after them and the job is complete. No percentages. No Gantt charts. No project plans and tracking. No new product release. No new strategy. No new anything.
Keep the animals fed and your job is complete. Isn’t that nice? Close the gate. Always close the gate.
Mas agua.
Sweat and inhale and exhale. Lift. Feel the length of your body anew as it navigates the hills, the rocks, the tree roots. Isn’t it strong? Don’t you see how this body with long muscles, tendons and bones braided together in harmony from your legs to your head were meant to move, meant to carry, meant to contract and navigate and breathe hard? This is what a body is meant for. This is what your body was meant for.
Lift. Lower. Scrub. Squat. Sweep. Lift. Lower. Lift. Lower. Unfocused vision. Soft eyes.
No words. You couldn’t find them even if you tried, anyway. What is the word for this? What is the word for clean? What is the word for complete? What is the word for here? Wash? Bear? Toucan? Puma? They are the only ones that matter.
Speak no words and think no words. Instead, hear the bristles of plastic against rock. Scrub away meat juices and egg yolks and porridge dribbles. No words are needed now. You could not make small talk with the person working next to you if you wanted to. Notice what it feels like to work in silence with another human. Notice how two bodies in motion vibrate on a different kind of frequency. There is no way to people-please here. There is only wash? And here? And good? And more water? And walking to the river and closing the gate behind you. Otherwise the monkeys will get in.
All the machines and devices and tools and contraptions you own, all to make life effortless - and none have given you the kind of quiet and satisfaction that one broken plastic broom and a bucket of dirty river water have.
Gates clicking open and closed. The rules from before are obsolete, so forget them as quickly as you can. The most important rule now is close the gate. Wipe the sweat out of your eyes and into your hair, lick the salt from your upper lip, remember that what you look like actually doesn’t matter. Your shirt has river water, mud, papaya on it. The sleeves are stained red where they dragged through the leftover blood from the puma’s dinner, when you scrubbed the wooden slats clean with soap and water and silence.
What matters is clean. What matters is more water. What matters is closed gates.
There is nothing to decide. Noticing is simply enough. There is no through-line to find. No analysis. No clever strategy. There is do. There is walk. There is more agua through three gates. There is all good- todo bien- and then there is rest.
Work, eat, rest. Work, eat, rest.
You are too tired each day to be depressed. To be anxious. You laugh thinking about how you used to force yourself to run four miles every other day, while listening to music or podcasts or books, in order to exercise this strong laborious dirty body. In order to hit your movement requirement.
You laugh to think that such little exertion ever could have been enough to scrape away the garbage for peace and quiet to bloom.
And never silent exertion, either. Always music. Always conversations. Always story. Always words, with you. Always analysis with you. It is not enough. It will never be enough.
Scrub so hard that your brain has no option but to shut the hell up.
Squat, scrub, sweep. Wash and wash and wash. Clean it, then dirty it, then clean it again. Notice how the work you do is for maintenance. Notice how the work you do is to keep what is already living, alive. Notice that it is never about making more of anything.
Notice that the Earth is only ever doing maintenance. Notice that it never insists upon more or new.
Only more water.
Only Scrub.
Next Up: Chapter 4
Thanks for reading part 3. Go scrub something today. If you do it long enough, it might start to scrub your brain clean, too.