The Art of Labor

At times it seems that the art of physical work has been forgotten. It does not seem to be thought of, even in the negative sense, as in, "that work is for simple people who are not smart enough to get better work."  Though it feels culturally forgotten, it is not gone.

I think about that great cultural amnesia, and feel  pain about it,  because there is real joy and beauty in work that is shaped by the realities of the earth. In learning how to live within the rhythms and hymns of the earth, we learn the art of stillness; the challenging art of attention to reality. What you believe will happen matters little, when it differs from the reality of what actually is happening. It is only from that quiet, still, attentive place that we truly work with the earth, instead of trying to change and control it. We wrap our days around the rhythms of the earth, and live in the happy cradle of the earth- where all things will become balanced, where more time will always come, where  real rest will happen at the end of each day, and each year is marked with what we have learned, not what we have failed at, or done wrong. We are lifted and carried by the energy that awakens the world, and we rest with the darkness that tells all living things to sleep. 

The play of children gives way to the work of adults, and we put down our head and pull upon ourselves a weight that no one can gracefully bear.  But the more I  consider, the more I believe the reality of play and joy, that  we are so sure of as children, is the real one. Why should we not play when we work? Why should we not feel joy within our bodies as we interact with the alive world that we inhabit? Why should the way the world is put together ever stop fascinating us? In learning something well, you realize only that you know so little, and that we have this precious medium of time to feel and know this endlessly expanding place.  Calvin Luther Martin, author of The Way of the Human Being, wrote tenderly, and very well about this. Here he writes about a story teller- a man Native to the Arctic:

" The old man would speak of a world bristling and crackling with power, the power of origination and deepest formation, which cared for everything- took care of everything- even human beings. The earth, he said, is not a place to fear. The problem was that adults had lost their nerve, lost faith in the marrow of it all. Children, he believed, still hold the mighty secret of trust. It was the lesson of the child to the adult: absolute trust. Once trust began percolating back into the soul again, humans would behold the liberating of those colossal earthly powers that now lay silent under the spell of our bad faith. The earth would be alive again and human beings would stop living lives of waiting, stop living in the curse of time and history, to live instead in the still point of beauty."