nothing doing

Our favorite coffee shop, the one we can walk to along enchanted roads of rock walls and serene rows of couve (the cabbage that feeds everyone, horses/cows/chickens/people), has as its back wall a large window that overlooks the garden of a man named Avelino.  As we sipped our cafezinhos, we watched Avelino wield his enchada (hoe) with a peaceful and purposeful dexterity.  We walked down, expressed admiration, asked if we count enter.  Avelino quietly and respectfully walked us through the immaculate rows of vegetables.  Here, the summer onions.  There, young lettuces.  At the corner, the chicken coop, his hatchery.  And, here, with some bemusement, the incorrigible snails that lay claim to some of the bounty.  We weren't much inclined to ask him what he "did" because it was obvious.  Avelino pointed up to his house, up a slope some fifty feet, the purchase of his children, he said.  Pride to be sure, for the success of his children.  But that wasn't what principally preoccupied him, turning his eyes back to the soil.  He handed us some of his produce, told us how to plant it, a fitting conclusion to our chance encounter.

Then there is Nanda, strolling through our back porch, popping in for a chat.  She looks to Michele's face and says: "Está sossegada, não?"  Nanda looks at me for confirmation.  I nod.  Sossegada is a curious word, its root in the Latin "sit" or a "sitting."  Michele was not sitting, but was in the appearance of sitting.  She "was" as if she were sitting – calm, with an aura of tranquility.

Often said in the mindfulness class du jour that we are not a human "doing", we are a human "being."  We'd been asked repeatedly what we were going to "do" in Portugal.  There is also the question of having "done":  Careers.  Professions.  You know, the real thing – work.  That we are "doing" nothing leaves the viewer with more than slight dis-ease.  Increasingly we find that we aren't bound up with that disease.

Being in Portugal brings to our attention the merit of inconspicuous lives.  The truth is not in the act;  the truth is in the quality of the act.  Portugal shall not be among the list of "accomplishments."  It shall not be for the sake of idleness, either.  It is for the discovery of how we should conduct ourselves, of how to be in the midst of doing – and not doing – the simple things that seem to require no attention.