A housewife’s opus magnum

Translated from the Lithuanian by Ada Valaitis

Well, how naïve you are, what unhappy people, searching for God, yourselves, enlightenment, nirvana, transcendence, nothingness, emptiness, dao, and goodness knows what else – shuttered in vipassana meditations, locked in silent ashrams, musty in churches, temples, weeping in the shade of minarets. Listen to the zen master housewife – I’ve been practicing for thirty years – I hold the rank of floor washer, so no questions for me, none of that: my God, for what, why, how – just a mandala of everyday life blown away by a child or time in a second – and then nothing. A rag again, wet, scouring. Where’s enlightenment, you ask. Where’s ecstasy? Know that sometimes, very rarely, when I roll my stone in the silence, the reward – a meditation of patience – when the rag stops being just a rag-so, and becomes a rag-here, full of diligence, inviting the floor and water to a conversation. The floor and I become one. The face of God appears in the cleaned spot.