I recently listened to an interview on NPR with the founder of “crop mobs” which is a new social movement where people, mostly ghostly pale 20′s and 30′s urbanites, gather on farms to assist with manual labor the farmers might need. We’re talking raised-bed cultivation, weed pulling, fence mending and other “salt of the earth” type tasks. In the interview, one of the participants said, “I just want to feel like I’m doing real work a couple of times a month. Nothing I do is real, I sit at a desk and make digital decisions. I’ve never sweat at my job unless the A/C’s busted.” This got me thinking, is it time for a re-definition of “hard work”?

I share the same current employment situation as the crop mob participant. Sit at a desk, change a few lines of code here, tell a remote tech what cable to connect there, hold a few meetings to feel human again. There are plenty of days where I come home feeling un-whole, a bit fraudulent about the difficulty of my line of work. But when I heard those thoughts through the filter of another person’s mouth, I suddenly felt the need to examine why I feel this sense of inadequacy. Are my opinions and judgments based on a practical assumption or on stereotypes that are due for a re-examination?

I began by asking if “honest work” was a function of anything quantifiable. In other words, if I accomplish X amount of Y is it “work” and if I accomplish X* of Y is it “honest work”? My first thoughts were drawn to sweat. If I sweat a certain ounces of water per day, have I put in a good day’s work? Well, in Arizona, I could literally lay in a hammock anytime between May and November and sweat about 1 gallon of water, never raising a finger, so that’s out. If I wake up feeling sore the next day, I got a good day’s labor in? No, I could have just slept weird or pulled a muscle reaching into the depths of my freezer for a popsicle. I moved onto a less objective quantifier: stress. But you only have to watch one episode of Jerry Springer or Judge Judy to see that stress levels are too subjective and often over-inflated for other reasons to be treated honestly. So what is it?

We wrap ourselves in technology so as to distance ourselves from the reality and complexity of life. This is an instinct for survival and propagation. From the wheel to the MacBook, humans have continually discovered and invented ways to ease our workload, so as to distance ourselves from the difficulties of being alive. And each step we take further and further away from digging in the soil we become more disconnected from the realities of being alive. It became clear that what the crop mob folks were attempting to do was not an honest day’s labor. That’s their 21st century selves trying to justify a more primal yearning. Rather than searching for hard work, we need to feel hard living. The stress a 20-lb stone places on your finger tips as you dig it from the soil you are preparing for spring’s planting. The stress of a summer’s heat wave killing off your crop, facing possible starvation through the hard winter. The stress of a distant howl in the dead of night as you tuck your children in for bed. We’ve become so isolated from life’s real stressors that we create and inject stress into manufactured situations and lives.

What became clear to me is that crop mobs are a wonderful idea, but not because they are honest work, rather, because they are honest life. It’s not a function of measuring that work and calling it better work than a desk job, it’s a function of realizing just how far away from the dirt your constructed and manicured lifestyle has taken you. And how you can reclaim that. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

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We are divine
We are reaching
We are centered
Om

Creative Force

I’ve never left you
Desired no other residence
I’m alive and well
Ivy-nooked in the folds of your mind
Swollen bellied hunger
For a chance to chase
Each photon of thought passing through
The dark recesses of your untapped skull

I watch involuntary belittlement
Riddling holes in your ego
As if you’ve ever failed
As if you’ve ever sincerely tried
I hear hollow pangs of stress tormenting
The organs below me
Contaminants devoured by a mouth
More eager to chew than speak

I know you stopped believing
I just never thought you’d stop dreaming

But I’m still here
I still believe
With or without you
Because we’ve all been there
Governed the deconstruction of our worldviews
Bared the crushing weight of emptiness
Festered in the stale loneliness of space and silence and time
You are full-bloom amid a vast landscape
Of godless orphans and beleaguered intellects

And just like every one of them
I am with you
The small dynamo of creation
Echoing through infinity
Which has always inspired
Your laughter and your rage
Orchestrating symphonies of you
For a world with frigid ears
You are to be all that can be conceived
And I will see you to the creation.

An exercise in the juxtaposition of meaning coupled with an observation that “being engaged in the process of marriage” is a horribly technical description of love that somehow has wrapped itself in whimsy in the minds of most people.

They used to dance in torrents like rain storms on August’s hot cement
Water vapor rising, telling clouds’ secrets, damp on jubilant faces; all teeth.
Skin taunt with passion, draped over repetition’s physique
Serrated muscle and joints.
This was when they owned balanced.
When arms were raised to anything but God.
When rhythms were their pandemics.
When partnering was more intimate than sex.
When birds looked at humans in awe.
For moments, she was the best of us.

Now, sidewalk gargoyled, she heaves and weeps as if excommunicating her soul
From a body no longer tamed; dry-boned.
Family’s first dreamer
Potential-fueled visions of change and meaning and legacy
Built modest hardwood floors and mirrored-walls.
She gave her community a safe home for their children’s eager feet.
Fostering youth, infusing hope into once barren-eyed dolls.
Twenty-seven years of counter-balancing setbacks against laughter;
Chess-matched life embraced by a woman accustomed to adversity,
But not immune.

Until one day…

Toes tight on sanity’s precipice,
Clawing deeply to last footholds of decency.
How many sacrifices can one make
And still be forgotten
By all those she loved with monastic devotion?
Her voice, though rough and raged, mottles with millions
Of broken-minded beggars and misfit transients
Whom I roll by, near off-ramps and bridges
Windows-up
Locked-doors
Empty-hearted
Human cruelty.