Do the Inner Work (Or, How I Turned a Muddy Mess into a Self-Improvement Project)
The fifth key to being awesome
How to Be Awesome, continued…
This series is a primer for anarchists on how to be awesome. Check out the previous installments:
Key 1: Be a Work in Progress.
Key 2: Choose Your Own Curriculum in the School of Life
Key 3: Practice Radical Self-Honesty
Key 4: Back up Values with Virtues
This is the fifth segment in the How to Be Awesome series.
Key #5: Do the inner work.
One thing I’ve learned over years—practically a lifetime—of being an “extremist” is that trying to effect change in the outer world is a more or less futile proposition until you begin to effect change on an inner level.
It took me a long time to really figure that out.
It also took me a while to figure out how to write this post because I felt that an analogy was needed, and I was struggling to come up with a good one.
And then, life delivered a satisfactory metaphor in the form of a muddy mess of a spring box.
For context, I live on a 19-acre property in southern Appalachia. When we were looking at properties to buy twelve years ago, one of the biggest points in favor of this particular piece of land was that it had bountiful water. There was a year-round creek and three springs—two of which had been developed with spring boxes at some point in the distant past, and one of which fed a small pond at the rear of the property.
We purchased the land and moved onto it, full of dreams and visions of how we could develop it into a functional homestead. There would be cattle, greenhouses, gardens, goats, chickens, maybe a few little off-grid cabins in the woods. When we signed the contract to buy the property, I remember feeling like the vision was so close I could taste it.
But the vision never quite came to fruition. Although we did complete multiple projects on the land—a chicken coop, a number of in-ground and raised bed gardens, and experiments with raising various types of livestock, the full homestead operation never quite got off the ground.
For one thing, we had underestimated the amount of work, and especially the amount of money, it would take to pull our vision out of the ethers and into reality. Working full-time jobs, it was difficult to find the time to invest in our dream. For another, we kept encountering what felt like insurmountable obstacles. Large sections of the property were inaccessible by vehicle. We needed a road, and our ideas for how to put one in were all thwarted, either by expense or crotchety neighbors.
The result was that we didn’t work on those sections of the property at all, but kept all of our projects concentrated on the two acres surrounding our house. Over twelve years, the more remote areas suffered from neglect.
This year it become apparent that the water management situation was suboptimal. The year-round creek had become a seasonal creek due to water diverting itself to new places. The spring-fed pond had turned into marsh and the water now trickled (or cascaded, during the summer rains) down the other side of the mountain, creating a new ravine that carried water to inconvenient places. And the two developed spring boxes—which had already been five years disused and unmaintained when we purchased the property—had become clogged, creating two more marshes in undesirable locations.
I was aware of all of these problems, but still felt restricted in my ability to do anything about them because I had built up a strong belief over the years: the belief that I couldn’t really work on these parts of the property until I had a road.
A few weeks ago, my friend at the farmer’s market shattered that illusion for me. I was complaining to him about the situation, and I repeated the self-defeating mantra: “I can’t do anything about it until I have a road.”
He laughed and said, “You have legs, don’t you?”
It was true. I did have legs. I couldn’t argue with it.
“Why don’t you make it a daily meditation walk?” he suggested. “Just hike around the land every day and do a little something. Clear some brush or move some dirt for twenty minutes. You’ll start to see the potential again, and solutions will present themselves.”
So I did. And my market friend was right. Possibilities began to reveal themselves to me.
One morning a couple weeks ago I hiked down to one of the springs—at least, where I thought the spring was (it was wet there, but the water was not visibly running, and no trace of a spring box could be seen.)
I considered this spring. I pondered whether it could be restored to a functional water source, and what I might do with it if that were possible. This area, I decided, would be excellent for goats. If I could get the spring running and the box (if I could find it) collecting water again, then I wouldn’t have to carry or pipe water down to the goats. And if I had goats, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time mowing and trimming weeds in the summer, which would give me more time to devote to my gardening and other projects around the land.
So, the next day, I returned to the spot and started clearing and digging.
As you can kind of see from the photo below, there was a good six inches of debris covering the spring box. But after many armloads of sticks and fallen branches and shovelfuls of mud later, I hit concrete.
I continued working on the spring box for a couple hours a day whenever the weather permitted it. Gradually, with a bucket, a shovel, and a good amount of grunting and cussing, I was able to clear all the mud from the box. It took many sessions of digging and clearing before I even struck the concrete bottom. Until then, I had no idea how deep the box even was. (FYI: It’s about four feet deep, and partially filled with a number of large, heavy rocks. Not sure why that is, but my friend Sarah suggested it’s for feng shui.)
Even then, I wasn’t absolutely sure where the actual spring was. The box takes about 36-48 hours to fill; a flow that’s enough to keep a couple of goats watered, but so slow it’s difficult to observe. There were a couple of pipes cemented into the side, indicating where the water used to come from, but by now they were clogged and inoperable.
There was nothing to do but keep digging. And eventually, I did locate the water source.
This next picture shows the context of the spring area a bit better. The water flows from the ground in that small, dark cavern behind the spring box. I believe that when the spring was first developed, it was framed in by those big heavy rocks that you can see behind the spring box, and the flow to the box was protected by more rocks to prevent mud and debris clogging it up. But over time, trees grew around the area, their roots sucking up the flow from the spring and slowly maneuvering the earth to divert the flow. If you look closely, you can see that these tree roots snaked themselves into a stack of rocks, eventually lifting the heavy stones and significantly altering the landscape.
All of this occurred so slowly and gradually—over decades—that it would be almost impossible to observe the process. Especially with the land passing from owner to owner several times.
Here’s where the metaphor comes in.
We all—every one of us—come into this world a deep well of potential, possessed of innate positive qualities that, developed properly, can help us lead a fruitful and meaningful life. Over time, especially during the impressionable years of early childhood and adolescence, we all—every one of us—take on some amount of muck and detritus that obscures and blocks all that original potential. (And this isn’t even taking into account the extra layers of crud that might come from previous tours around the incarnation cycle, if you believe in that sort of thing.)
Point being, we all get muddy. Some of us get muddier than others. But no matter how enmired you are, the innate positive qualities are still there, waiting to be cleansed, clarified, and put to good use in a way that affirms life and brings sustenance and growth to our surroundings.
Doing your inner work can be like shoveling through wet, muddy gunk and not even knowing quite what you’re looking for—just that there might be something valuable there, if only you can clear away the debris enough to see it.
It is not the type of project you can complete all in one go. It requires patience and persistence. At first, it’s easy to want to give up. The project looks hopeless. There’s so much effort involved. The mess is unpleasant to look at, the work can bring up aches and pains, and every time you poke around in it you come up covered in muck.
Just like an old spring box can be clogged with heavy rocks, smelly mud, sticks and leaves in various states of decomposition, the unexamined psyche can contain all manner of detritus. You may uncover in yourself layers of anger, resentment, laziness, dependency, self-centeredness, envy, greed, fear. You may be startled or disgusted to find them there. Your first impulse may be to quickly cover them back up, go back to ignoring them, pretending they are not there so that you can feel superficially better about yourself, about your life. But if you stop at this point, you’re denying yourself the opportunity to find out what lies beneath all that gunk.
And what’s beneath is something amazing. Something wondrous and life-giving. A miracle of nature.
To “do the inner work” means two things:
You practice self-awareness and radical self-honesty (see Key #3 for more on this.)
Using the problems, issues, and interpersonal conflicts that occur in your life as a guidance system, you courageously deep dive into your own psyche, analyze the aspects that you keep hidden from yourself, and slowly chip away at the layers of faults, imperfections, and confused motives that cloak and mask your essential core of power and goodness.
Part of doing the inner work is getting up the gumption to do the outer work. To look around at the problems in your life and to commit to resolving them. Even if you have no road, and you have to bushwhack your way through, and you know it might take months or even years to implement a solution. Just committing to that one small effort each day, bringing your inner resources to bear on your outer problems, that in itself is a monumental feat of inner work.
As you begin to see the exterior progress, bit by tiny bit, you also become more aware of your interior success: you feel more confident, more capable, more patient and accepting because you know that change is within your control.
This is a life’s work. Your life’s work, truly, and mine, no matter how we channel it. May we never consider ourselves done.