Yesterday, I knocked a winter’s worth of crunchy leaves off the hammock and lay down. The thin filter of bare branches above me was enough to cool the weak winter sunlight, and as I rocked my skin chilled and warmed, chilled and warmed.
Just the simple word dogwood in the book I was reading sent me into a moment of full-body homesickness, a yearning for springtime in the Blue Ridge.
My cells remember, and look forward to the turning of the seasons, in this place or in that.
“Small measures, strong convictions, good coffee,
and kind dogs will see you through.”
~Jenna Woginrich
I finally got around to reading Molly’s book, and I’ve been crossing my fingers along with Jenna as she goes from farm-renter to farm-owner. It’s heady stuff, inspiring and cheering, comforting like a good cup of tea and thick socks. Women making a living out of the things they love, and writing about it. It gives me a case of the warm fuzzies and makes me more than a little jealous. It’s time to stop living vicariously through other people’s gardens and books and start putting my own hands in the earth, my own pen to paper. That’s a big part of what this little blog is all about.
I never had a good answer for the age-old “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question. And I still don’t—least not when the question means, “What job title do you want to have when you punch in and out at the same place every day?” I’m finding I don’t do so well with the extreme separation of work and home—blame it on my hermit tendencies, but I’m increasingly loathe to leave the house at the same time every day. Shift work apparently is not my thing. I find that everything, even helping people, starts to acquire an assembly line flavor if you do it long enough. It’s not so much the work itself as how the work must be done: clock in, run calls, clock out. Clock in, run calls, clock out. Clock in, run calls, clock out. I can smile and make polite conversation and be the model of professionalism in the twenty or forty minutes that I’m with one patient, but that’s hardly a real connection, and after a while it starts to feel like a farce. A very worthwhile farce, but a farce nonetheless.
FARCE [fahrs] noun: a light, humorous play in which the plot depends upon a skillfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character.
See what I mean?
While I still have dreams about becoming a geologist or a botanist or a physiotherapist, what’s been quietly but insistently slipping to the top of my list is a desire to make my work, my primary labor, something that produces not a paycheck but a life.
It has much to do with dollars, and with capitalism, and with how we (wrongly) value things in our culture. All of my time has value, not just the bit “on the clock,” when I’m producing monetary income for someone else.
It takes telling yourself this every day, and reading the words of others who’ve gone down the sort of path you want to take, to start moving the dream out of the abstract and into the world. Anything worth doing takes time, and practice, and a little ingenuity. And what could be more worth doing than this—building a life worth living, worth sharing, worth writing about.
My real work.
When I was young, Sunday mornings more often than not woke me with the gentle pops of the needle touching down on my mother’s big turntable. This is how I learned Sundays, and how they remain—this morning, I stretched under the covers, pulled on a sweater, and stopped at the stereo on my way to the coffeepot. Music first; the rest of the day after. Normal—mundane, even—but with its own soundtrack.
I have music on for housecleaning, music for cooking, music for studying. When the weather starts to warm and the birds are singing songs of their own, I turn the speakers toward the open windows and have music for yardwork. Before the age of the mp3, my carry-on luggage would have more CDs by volume than anything else. It may be prudent to carry an extra set of clothes, but I’d rather a few good tunes than clean underwear most days.
I’ve tried my hand at piano and flute, but stuck with neither. I’ve carted a 58-year-old guitar with me across three time zones, but can still only pick out a few chords. I took voice lessons as a child, and again in college, but generally only sing when just the dogs are around to listen. I swoon deeply and regularly over a voice or a guitar line or a well-executed crescendo, but I spend no more time making my own music than I do making my own socks. Both are something I use and take for granted every day, and I leave the crafting of each to folks that I have, for the most part, never met.
My rockstar dreams were doffed along with my last pair of Chuck Taylors. The dream is far simpler now, but worlds more compelling: I’m strumming on the porch while the fireflies emerge out of the dusk. Probably someone else wrote the song, but it’s my fingers, my voice making the sound.
You’ve probably seen a few of those Cold War films—the ones advising well-groomed and preternaturally calm white people how to survive nuclear holocaust:
I’ve been doing a bit of ducking and covering myself lately, and it quite plainly has not involved a keyboard or an internet connection. (Mostly it’s involved snowshoes, good books, and long drives. Tomato, tomahto.)
Nothing’s really gone to shit, and all remains well in the land of me—it also remains well and truly busy. Free time ebbs and flows, shrinks and expands, and lately it’s been rather slim. Free time is also a question—now that you’ve done what you have to do, what do you want to do?—and one that I sometimes answer by staring slackjawed at the teevee, even if I later curse not having written instead.
But regret is like the impotence and anger I feel reading the news: a dead-end, gut-rotting sort of feeling that doesn’t fix or restore or console or support anyone or anything. It doesn’t serve me, so best to let it go. It’s okay to duck and cover every now and again, so long as you eventually come out from under that picnic blanket.
The impulse to crawl under there in the first place usually strikes me in those periods when work is sucking me dry. The more work robs from the rest of my life, the more I’m seized by the this-isn’t-how-it’s-supposed-to-be and are-we-there-yet gremlins. It leads a gal to all manner of instant-gratification daydreams—winning the lottery, and the like—to distract her from the work and the time that must go into creating the life she wants.
My fantasy life looks a little different that most, because it doesn’t involve much leisure. I still want to work for a living—and probably harder than I work now—but I want my customers to be furry and four-legged, my time clock to rise in the east and set in the west, and my wages to be paid in fresh eggs, sturdy walls, and a byline. That life is coming, but I’m so impatient for it to be here.
Sometimes it’s hard to have priorities and a paycheck.
Move Your Money
There’s an interesting piece of legislature before our state representatives right now that would transfer New Mexico’s liquid cash from Bank of America to accounts at local banks. It seems almost embarrassingly obvious, and it’s shocking that it’s something we’ve not done before… but, then again, we’re talking politicians here. Read the Santa Fe Reporters bit on it here.
I’ve only ever banked with the little guys, and it’s something I encourage everyone to follow. Much like government, CAFOs, and big box stores, I don’t support putting money into something so big I can’t see its borders. Just makes me think of steamrollers. It’s been said before by folks smarter than me, but it bears repeating: Too big to fail is too big to exist.
Check it out:
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Posted in Commentary + Philosophy
Tagged move your money, NM HB66