for two gallons of fuel

Sunday, after church, after 2 fast-paced, fun-filled days with the kids, after dropping the kids off at Leigh's and it could be a crash-and-burn day: lonely, empty, all too quiet in the house.

A good day to dig with a backhoe, so I dug a hole today. Not mindless digging, mind you. I've been not real happy with dumping the water out of my splash tank every time I fire up the sauna. 200 plus gallons of good useable water gets drained out on the ground after each sauna--water that could be used for the garden. But, since I sauna all year and only garden for one season, I figured I need to cache that water.

Well, my neighbor, Dan, gave me 2 tanks last summer. They are 12 ft. long, 5 ft in diameter and hold 1700 gallons each. So, no, not mindless digging. I dug a hole right in front of the sauna building deep enough to contain that metal tank. Then I'll plump some pipe from the sauna splashtank to this buried tank. I figure this tank can hold the water from about 8 - 10 saunas. And in the area in front of the sauna is where the new garden will go, so I can take the water from the holding tank and go to right to the garden. I think I'll even put rain gutters on the sauna roof and collect that rainwater into the holding tank, too.

While I was digging I was listening to a new favorite song I stumbled on. The Moscow boys' choir singing Psalm 141, "Let my prayers rise up..." A breathe-taking piece that probably has not been played in many backhoes.

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What struck me about all of this was that, and this hit me whilst I stood deep in this huge hole I had just dug, I dug this hole--deep enough to bury a SUV so that nobody would ever see it again--in 2 hours and used maybe 2 gallons of diesel fuel. Think how long it would take to dig this by hand. And I just dug it in its entirety on a whim, after church, and because I felt like it. And all the energy needed was contained in 2 gallons of fuel. A jug of diesel cheated a week's worth of hard labor and aching muscles and blisters. Technology can short-cut some thing and make work-arounds, and there might not be any aching backs. But for all the back aches we can jump over, we're not able to get past heart aches and aches of the soul. "Lord, here my prayer" from myriad thousands of lips on thousands of forty-day stretches of Lents.