The Zen Buddhists say that before enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water. Then after enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water. That idea stayed with me as I worked through the laundry following a recent trip to Hawai’i.

Travel doesn’t usually bring me enlightenment, especially on business trips. Yet traveling to Hawai’i seems to. Maybe it’s the big change of scenery (hello there, honeycreepers and humpback whales). Perhaps it’s the challenge of a new or new-ish experience (snorkel in the marine preserve, hike in the rain forest). Or we could credit the big blocks of down time alongside the steady weather, wind, and waves.

When we ride bike, Sam sometimes says, ‘let’s go get some wind.’ The Dutch call it uitwaaien, which literally means ‘blow out.’ Like many vivid words from other languages, uitwaaien has no English translation. The idea is this: head out into nature—preferably windy and along the coast—to get refreshed and clear your mind.

With our hike to Green Sands Beach on a high-winds day, we leaned into the sea spray and wind, coating us with a fine, sparkling olivine sand and turning the six-mile trek into a pilgrimage. Before laundering, my up-cycled denim ruck sack had become a grayish-green. After laundering, it returned to its faded blues.

Papakolea Beach, also known as Green Sands, Hawai’i

Waves can be hypnotic. My mind seeks the pattern, somehow knowing what wave to expect based on the pull beneath my feet. Turtles gnawing on the algae and black crabs running on the lava rocks roll with that wave energy, too. A good day with the waves means sand in my suit. More laundry.

Thanks to all the down time, I finished two books. Both rocketed to the top of the reading list after reading other books on living with disability. They became yin and yang in my head, although that wasn’t part of the initial plan.

Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip is a smart journey through feminist, queer, and crip theories. Her critique pulled in seminal and influential works, boosted by her giant-Venn-diagram view of how these theories inform one another in research and in real life.

David Mas Masumoto’s Secret Harvests is a poetic, lyrical story of finding family history where few writings, photos, or artifacts exist. His aunt became disabled after a childhood brain infection. She did not go with the rest of the family to a Japanese internment camp. Lost and almost invisible to family history, the elders presumed she was dead until Masumoto got a call. He learned that his aunt was in a nursing home nearby. He wove fragments of memory into a new family story, creating meaning that is both deep and breathtaking.

I returned Kafer’s book to the library and filed Masumoto’s on my shelf. I’ve collected all his works since Epitaph for a Peach. I appreciate Kafer’s book for the powerhouse that it is. Another disability author said there is life before you read FQC and then life after FQC. She’s not wrong. We need thinkers like Kafer to make progress in living with disability.

Yet the way Masumoto found and made meaning seemingly from thin air, especially in the larger struggle to understand where we all belong, like a poet does–that feels like enlightenment to me.

Back to the laundry. We will see whether the sun did its work on the dog’s blankets.