As the bus arrives in Boston, pulling through the concrete, tall world of the city, I'm reading E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful and still thinking about work.
Travel and Travail
What is work? I'm always between two languages so I think about travail. This word in Old French meant suffering, so that must be why I don't want to do it. The first recorded use of it is in reference to the pains of childbirth, which makes sense, so it is birthing something, creating. In Songlines, Bruce Chatwin associates travail with travel, they come from the same word: “‘Travel': same word as ‘travail' - ‘bodily or mental labour', ‘toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature', ‘exertion', ‘hardship', ‘suffering'. A ‘journey' (p. 215)." I'm traveling now, this strange mixture of productivity and suffering that is movement across the Earth. I always write more when I am on the road. In Old English, the main knot of meaning seems to be simply “to do" which leads to a more productive meaning for the word: to do something, to make something. Both words of course now have economic meanings and have been caught up in that all-encompassing, unshakeable structure we call capitalism. Marx of course criticized “abstract labour", the reduction of man to the work he does in support of a fraudulent economy. This runs behind my thoughts; the whole system is corrupt so why would should I “work" for it?
Work, In Many Forms
But I do work. My work is usually intellectual. I work with words, I write, translate, I think, I put concepts together, draw conclusions, read, on repeat. I make and reinforce lexical fields and neuronal connections in my brain. I try to do this with as much awareness and consciousness as possible. I learn. It doesn't feel like work and it makes my eyes and back hurt. I sometimes get paid for it. Then there is the work I have been doing on a farm. I walk to the barn, I check on the lambs, I give them hay. Another day I come in and pack sauerkraut into jars with a crew. I do this till my shoulder hurts and then I ask someone to do it for me and I put labels on jars. This is what many people call work. I'm working to produce something marketable, but I'm not getting paid for it because I like the communal work and I believe that more people should eat sauerkraut. I did get paid for tending the flock. Mostly what I get paid for is teaching, but that feels less like work than all the rest. That is helping someone learn so they can think and then grow from this thinking. I like that work.
It’s A Lie There Isn’t Enough Money To Go Around
So, money? It seems to accumulate when I am not looking and has a function that is actually quite independent from my level of “work". It seems to me to be another big fraud. It's materialized energy that we use to get goods. It is nice to have and not having it makes you feel like you don't matter or even exist. People think they don't have work so they aren't worth money and then it's a downward spiral to not having any. It's our cultural and social currency and some people are purposefully left out of it because our current system rewards greed and being white and male, generally. I feel pretty safe saying this. People look at homeless people and think “They should get a job" regardless of the fact that having a job doesn't even mean that you have a place to live anymore. It seems to me more people might notice all these things that don't line up between what we believe about money and how it works. I'm ready for a monthly minimum salary for everyone so that then we can only do the work we want to do, and it's a lie there isn't enough money to go around, just like it's a lie that we can't nourish everyone on the planet. We say this because we want to keep wasting food and money. I'm not sure why, to keep the whole system up and running? I haven't figured that one out yet, but it also doesn't make any sense. I need to read more about it. In the 1990's Jeremy Rifkin published a book The End of Work which didn't end work and didn't please many economists and sociologists. We are always creating new work.
Cyclical and Mythical Time
What about time? What can I add? Hello Saturn. It's cyclical and mythical to me. I realize I learn in cycles, I go back, the same blocks appear again, I react a little differently because I'm a little wiser. I'll do this till I die. I'm back in Geneva now, again. It's the Full Moon in Scorpio, or was a few hours ago, and in celebration of my more scorpionic showy side, I've posted a poem composed during ritual about being the moon, on my poetry blog: orphanedline.blogspot.com. I don't know if anyone will read this but I like putting it out there in case it can help someone. Maybe you are the moon sometimes too.
On Being Seen
This makes me think about being seen, and I'll leave you with Asia Suller's beautiful musings on the topic, of how we are always and already being seen by the world around us. Don't forget! https://onewillowapothecaries.com/you-are-seen/
Just the other day a chipmunk watched me from a tree trunk, listening intently as I sang the Gayatri mantra. I'm getting ready to take Asia's Intuitive Plant Medicine class again and I'm very excited about the plants I will meet this time and the things I will learn. I will continue going a little deeper down the spiral.
Enjoy the wheel of time as she turns again to Beltane! I'm getting back to work.
(Originally posted April 30, 2018)