thoughts on “work”

“As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections – as one is now said to work “for a living” or “to support a family” – but the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love. ”

Wendell Berry, pg. 133, ” The Body and the Earth”, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

D and I have this ongoing conversation, that I am sure many of you have, about what we want to be. The conversation usually involves a return to the basic questions we have about our lives and our future:

What careers do we want?

Do we actually want careers?

How do we want to make money?

How much money do we really need?

Is there any way we can work from home?

Is there any way we can live without making lots of money?

Can we offer a full, good life to our future children without working full-time?

And so on….

During these conversations, we often recall with frustration the assumptions planted in us from childhood, that our whole education was meant so that we might get a job and make money some day. We remember that dangerous but well-intentioned constant prodding from adults, “What do you want to be?”, to which the only answer was always some career choice. “You can be anything you set your mind too, a doctor, lawyer, teacher, anything!” The idea that earning a wage is the goal to work towards, so that we can buy things and be happy, and the best way to do that is by getting a good education, should be a crime to plant in the minds of children.

Our biggest hope, the things we love best, our vocation, is to live well on the little land that we have; to invest in our community, and love our neighbors; to eat from our garden. And if we are going to live this way, we will have to get good at answering the normal questions from people, like “Where do you work?” and encountering the stigma of not having a job. Here, it is as if if you aren’t working somewhere, then you actually aren’t working. Even if all we really want to do is work our very hardest, for ourselves, our community, and Creation.

We return to Mr. Berry for our encouragement:

“We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone.” –p. 134, “The Body and the Earth”

OK, that’s enough time on the soapbox for today.

On a joyous and more practical note: We have spinach and lettuce coming up in our cold frame, and today D is working hard on our portable chicken coop (pictures to follow)! Let the connections of community with Creation and ourselves be restored!

(some of) the joys of our home life

Last night over supper, I posed a theoretical question to D: If the owner of this house offered to sell it to us, and the owner of the newer, beautiful, just-our-style house right up the road offered his house for sale, for the exact same amount, which would you choose? We had a hard time deciding, below are some of the reasons why.

This living space offers:

• Leaky roofs (the sound of rain drops plunking in metal pots on a warm night is just too romantic)
• Wood stove coziness
• Lessons on community living; we have a love/hate relationship with the mice
• Garden space
• More garden space
• My Dadaw’s shop, full of adventures and treasures for a fellow like D
• Protective dogs from up the road (My parents have two big dogs to stay with their goats, but they seem to know part of the brood is at another location. They come down at least once a day to check on us.)
• Fresh eggs
• The morning birds outside our window
• Bread baking
• Nights to sit and read for hours
• An old old floor that makes all the furniture look topsy-turvy: the level, as a tool, has become obsolete
• The surprising spirit of my grandparents, meeting me as I round a corner at a certain time of day, and showing itself in the little bulbs popping up in the yard right now

Polly the Protector

wood stove coziness

a certain time of day

I know that some of the things on this list could certainly transfer to whatever living space we end up in, but so far, living in this house been a stretching out kind of joy.

I find myself…

I find myself here, on Bee Branch, living in the house where my grandparents raised my mother and her siblings. This house, built by the same man who built the church and nearly all the other houses in Harrell Hill in the 1900s, is like an archeological site. I can peel layers from the floor and walls and go back through the decades: the floral linoleum of my mother’s teenage years, the thin, shiny paneling that covers the older, rough bead board, and finally, the dull maple of 1910, worn down by the house’s first family for whom it was built.

Our house from the road on a cold gray day

I find myself in a new yet deeply familiar community, where neighbors make up for the valleys and woods that separate us by being extra loving and reliable. People whose eyes filled with tears when D and I came into church the first Sunday we were back.

I have come back to a place where the language is different yet instinctively known, and the primary questions, “Whose girl are you?” and, “Where you living?” situate the individual in the familiar web of reality that holds the world together.