work

Good work is usually a combination of the physical and the mental.  It is, in any case, infused with wisdom.  It is wisdom that can orient work toward where it seems the universe is going, toward what we think the Creation needs.  And it is wisdom applied through work by which we humans are best able to approach the spiritual.

So then, my project of pulling up old barbed wire-a full mile of it, all of it five strand usually with the bottom one or two wires buried in the sod-has so far cost numerous scratches on my forearms, two tick bites and shredded beyond use one pair of leather gloves and the sleeves of two work shirts.  I am half done.

This is what is generally thought to be hard labor.  And it is hard and nasty.  And so far, it is done alone, which is a bad way to live a human life.  But it is not hopeless.  I work in the breeze and sunshine, surrounded by birdsong.  The wire is brittle with age and rust.  Most of my rolls are a collection of short broken pieces.  I learn a respect for the capacity of hard work shown by the long ago farmer who installed all this, before he gave it up and entered it into CRP

This is hard labor done for a reason.  This place badly needs grazing animals.  And grazing animals must be protected from barbed wire.  Around me I can see in the grass the swales created by tillage on too steep, highly erodible land.  The cropping system required as a prerequisite to CRP entry sent far too much soil down the creek, beautiful though it is today as it meanders through the grass.

I see where the wire was cut to let the tractor into one after another of the crop fields.  He had a better idea in the first place.  But he was supported in that by neither the agriculture industry or the government.  What is the future for us, a people that find it too hard, or beneath them to think of the care of our land?