The Work of Life in the Shadows

With the still rapidly increasing daylight of early Spring, April has brought forth a blossoming of many flowers. White and Pink Dogwoods, white, pink and purplish flowering crabapples, beautifully scented pale purple lilacs, purplish Redbuds, purple moneyplants, bright fuchsia and pale blue creeping phlox, and light blue Bluebells, among many other flowers, have provided abundant beauty. In our stony vegetable garden, rapid growth of perennials like Lemon Balm, Oregano, Garlic and Fennel have joined the early sprouts of our heirloom Arugula, Spinach, Lacinato Kale, Romaine and Grandpa Admire’s lettuce and Turnip Greens, holding the promise of the growing season.

Though our area experienced a winter that was unusually warm, mid-April has seen a long cold spell, as it has in past years. Dogwood Winter, named because the cold spell coincides with the blooming of the native trees, has lived up to its name, with several hard frosts, causing us to cover our tender young plants with sheets during the cold nights. Seeming to make up for the warm winter, April’s cold spell has been longer and cooler than past years.

While the Earth has continued on its rhythmic cycle embracing new life in the growing light, the human world has been consumed with grim news of the ongoing pandemic. As multiple challenges faced many people in hard hit areas, our family has been extremely lucky in our relatively remote area. The slowing of work and community life has allowed my wife to spend three days a week babysitting for her daughter and husband in their home, giving the family the chance to catch up on chores and, on rare occasion, even rest a little from their work of life. It has been a tender and sweet time for all of them, with the love and warmth of our lives given powerful contrast by the hard reality facing others.

In our community, people have been making special efforts to help others in many different ways. Some have hosted fundraisers for affected people, some have volunteered work to help others, and, in our own situation, the food club has rapidly delivered multiple special orders to people to provide extra food at reasonable prices. Our yoga instructor has provided readings of chapters from The Poet of Tolstoy Park while my stepson has uploaded short pieces of comic relief. People around us have risen to the occasion, revealing a strength that is sometimes obscured by the humdrum of daily routine.

While I was picking up a delivery for our food club, the woman who, with her husband, ran the bulk food store chatted with me about the situation. I explained that my family was very lucky and in spite of the hardship, we were having some very sweet times together.

Commenting on this, the owner replied, “When I was fifteen, there was civil war in Lebanon and we were without running water, sometimes for months. But in those times, I sometimes made a human connection with others that was different from any other time.”

An oracle I have read speaks of the daily grind of spiritless abundance that is common in our modern society, saying that because our cultural stagnation is “a time when most of our wants are provided, there is little need for the heroes, the artists, the great thinkers and innovators.” For many, daily life is simply the mindless repeating of routine. In these difficult times, the good we have in our life is placed in stark contrast to the hardships in the larger world, making our private worlds more powerfully alive and poignant.

Good times in life, which may seem fleeting for some, are to celebrate and savor. Hard times are to be survived and to teach us what is important.

Protection from consequences of our actions, which is common in patriarchy and by those high in hierarchies of power-over-others, leads us away from the center of Earthly life. In contrast, it is times like these that pull our family much closer, deepening our connection.

This time of challenge, which will not pass quickly, has coincided with my own spiritual changes. For decades, I’ve practiced good works in our community and through charities, but I have also worked each day with money-chasers to support my family. Though among the economically fortunate people in my community, I have witnessed tremendous spiritual corruption at my worksite and made compromises that have brought me no small amount of remorse. I have often been amazed that for all the good fortune they share, many I have known through work have been bitter and ungrateful for their abundance in a world of hunger, violence and all-too-unnecessary suffering.

After years of being troubled by my coworkers and working for a supervisor who treated others more like a grade school bully than a respectful adult coworker, my deep unhappiness, combined with our financial stability, allowed me to convince my dear wife to change our plans, allowing me to leave my career in computers and pursue a career of good works through working with people with profound mental illnesses.

“I’ll be working directly with people who are mentally ill.” I told a coworker on another team on a private chat system, “A lot like my work here.”

There was a pause for several minutes while I wondered how he would react. Knowing the difficulty that my supervisor and some of my teammates cause others, he finally replied, “LOL, I laughed so hard I snorted.”

In my work world of privileged people, I’ve witnessed a lot of mental illnesses, bigotry, corruption and self-pity in my very fortunate and functional white coworkers, causing me to question my principles and morality. Their callous disregard for others, mixed with their own personal unhappiness, propelled me toward a more meaningful calling of good works, moving me closer to the center of Earthly life.

“God will certainly bless your choice,” a kindly puritan coworker told me, excited for my new commitment.

I accepted the blessing gratefully and paused to welcome it, hoping that my new career will not bring financial disaster to my wife and I. Though I accepted the blessing as the woman’s way of saying, “I want your choice to bring you good fortune,” I couldn’t help but wonder at the woman’s culture, where people with the tiny size of my mind and the fleeting moment of my life can claim they know the will of a mysterious, unknowable entity responsible for the unfathomable universe. It seems odd to me, and a little scary, to be able to pronounce such judgments, though I am glad the woman approves of my choice.

I rely on good works to bring good things into my life; I’ve observed what going around coming around enough that I consider it a reliable statement of facts about time, similar to the rising of the sun and the abundance of spring. What I do not know is will the urban human god of money and power-over-others reward this new path? It is that force that holds sway over much of human life, and that unknown future that we face as I act on faith.

My team lead, who I will soon forget, has served an important purpose. He has propelled me from a comfortable, meaningless career where I have been stagnant into a greater commitment to life and helping others. Without the unpleasant conditions fostered at work, I have little doubt the material comfort and security would have held me there for the rest of my work life.

“Also thank the demons,” my wife told me once, quoting a new age teaching. The hardness in our lives serves a purpose.

In the shadows of our back yard, moss grows heavily on the stone and concrete block steps fashioned by my stepson and a friend. The moss, slowly turning the hard, unliving rock into the soil that will nurture new life, does the work of life in cold, damp darkness. The pandemic that will ravage humanity for seasons and perhaps years to come offers its hard wisdom. The simple, crucial gifts of life, love, family and good health, taken for granted in a stagnating human world, is central to our minds now.