Work

·      Marge Piercy's poem, “To Be Of Use” – Considering work

A  woodpecker works to find breakfast in a tree before me.  Beside the river, sandbars and a shallow remnant lie alongside each other.  Sparrows fall like leaves.  The air is silent.  “The thing worth doing well done” – preparing food, loving a child, choosing a word, painting what is felt more than seen, listening – is beautiful and true and necessary.  Her parting line – “the pitcher cries for water to carry and the person for work that is real” – speaks to me in a strong, clear voice of necessity, of exasperation at the premise of a wasted life, at the ways in which our culture advocates medication because disappointment is the assumed human norm.  When we have work to do, however, we can heal.  We find purpose.  The tiny head taps in rapid succession, cheeping staccato words to another close by.  The work is what it is – necessary for life, without lament or evasion.  He is wondrous fair – bright red head, black and white horizontally striped body, bright light through a blind.  He taps, chirps, taps, chirps.  Work.  Not workaholism, but work as legitimate and fulfilling.  Work as nourishing and necessary.  Work as cleansing and instructive.  My longing – our longing – for legitimate work is driven by a desire to create, to ease, to mend, to tend, to care for, to leave a mark.

Thresholds

My neglect of the work here is inexplicable; but as I, at last, consider why I took an unintentional sabbatical from writing, I see that this year was a challenge.  Someone special, who I didn't understand in the past, came forth again, patient and earnest, awaiting the right time.  As I heard my qualms and fears and truths tumble forth, I realized love for this man, someone who could actually return it and make my life better by being in it.  He asked me to marry him.  I accepted.  That commitment has given us the opportunity to explore an intimacy that makes real for the first time the promise of the Holy Spirit.  I am surprised each day that such a person exists, that as my confusion surfaces, it bursts like so many bubbles in a simmering pot.  The experience grows stronger and more elastic each day, that I might extend myself on his behalf to help and grow him, as I am grown through this loving.  Thank You.  I squeeze my eyes shut as I hold my heart open, a little bird caught in the wind.  He cups his hand around me, shielding me, caressing me, reminding me of his constancy.

I stand in awe of my sons, strong and tall and noble as trees.  They love and understand and reach for me even in my prickliness.  They strive and evolve despite the difficulty of the world and its ridiculous demands.  They are fine in a way I don't understand, and their origins are confusing...who switched my babies?  I do not deserve them, but am grateful beyond expression.  They love me so well.  Richard loves them, too.

My work is, as always, a beautiful gift.  I leave it in bus stations, in the backs of friends' cars, out in the rain, and still it gives back so much more than I give it.  Because there is so much of it, and because I now have a husband and son-to-be as well as my own progeny, the work and attention required precludes research or art-making.  I miss them both, realizing they need their time for my mental and spiritual health.

Richard goes to Afghanistan next week for five months.  I have always thought war was a part of the human path to peace through brutality, a poor substitute for real change.  He has helped me see that there's a little more to it than that, and that there are very real threats to our way of life - very real people who hate Americans enough to kill as many as they can, indiscriminately, and see it as a path to Heaven.  I have come full circle in my mourning it, seeing that he wants to go and needs to.  My challenge, in his absence, is to be a mother to his son who knows only that a mother figure would steal from her own children to satisfy her own greed.  I ask for grace to help my ignorance and fear.

My personal challenge is to do something about my own excuses - my own potentially detrimental habits, my own cynicism and sarcasm, my own rough edges, my own personal wars.  Until I do, my rhetoric is hypocritical and I pretend.

Shalom.