Cold Winter Reflection: the Real Work Is Not in What We Do, but in How We Do It (Mamas and Papas and The Killers)

Cold – winter – west.  Last year, the first year back at Dry Creek, cold was a novelty I attacked with relish.  Bringing in firewood, plowing, shoveling, feeding chickens—the deeper the snow, the lower the thermometer, the more I loved it.  This winter it has been wearing me down along with my work.  That, unfortunately, is how we humans are—always looking for a way out, always looking for a way to avoid the labor of the moment.  California dreaming.  And once we’re  there, California becomes a reality.

There is an ache that is born deep in us.  The feeling, no matter where we are, we don’t quite belong.  That is the magic sadness that drives literature.  All songs, all poems, all stories, one way or another, are the search for home--or just as often, for paradise, for Eden.

The need to be still haunts us all, alludes us all, drives us on—and yet we still don’t find what we are looking for. 

Out the car window, the Tushar Mountains are spectacularly rugged, spectacularly white.  When I lived in the city I longed for such sights.  God grand and right in your face with his over-the-top creation.  I ached to communicate once again with river stone and brittle wood.

Occasionally, I am still blissfully in awe of grandeur.  I love returning from work only to startle herds of deer and flocks of turkey from the lane to the house.

And yet just as often I return home from work as the last sun slants across Main Street of our small town and there will be a sort of sadness sink deep inside me.  Damn, where is everybody?  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a Denny’s?  Or just a ma & pa joint with a great big plate glass window looking out on Main?  Someplace warm other than home to read a book and listen to clinking dishes and conversation.

But there really isn’t.  There’s fast food out at the freeway and an overpriced restaurant at the motel.  No town center.  Not anymore.  Just houses, churches and farms, and beyond that the wild.

But I know if I ever have to move somewhere I will be just as lonely for here.  Perhaps that is our life’s work—to realize paradise is not a place, but a state of mind, not an escape but the labor of turning wherever you are into its own unique kind of paradise, whether in Alaska or the Bronx.

Labor, as the work is never done.  The real work is not in what we do it, but how we do it—our connection to God and other people.