On this last day of summer the weather has finally caught up with the late September date. No more kidding around, we are thinking now of laying in wood and all the rest.
It has been a summer of hard work in these parts, and a lot of manual labor. And there is grace in that.
It was a post here last May– 15 months ago, kind of feels like 15 years, or 15 minutes, don’t know which– I was quoting Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her. His alter ego Yunior has lost his love through flamingly bad behavior and throws himself into his work in an effort to push through and move on.
“You bend to the work because it feels like hope, like grace,” Díaz writes.
I continue to work at this lovely knot of an idea that is grace. The Daily Om in my inbox the other day was about grace, and had some nice bits: that the very idea that grace exists, unearned and often unmerited, gives us hope. That grace is there in small and large acts of generosity, kindness, forgiveness.
A grace note in music. The grace of silence, in the space between words.
The grace of just being purely present. Of bending to the moment with your whole being. Of not working to get to the next thing, vacation, retirement, the end of the day, but being present in it, fully. Grace is there. In hard, hard work.
A fine local organic farm, MX Morningstar, posted this quote from Kahlil Gibran on the nature of work and labor, and it pretty much says it all.
Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, a sign to you when that dream was born, and in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, and to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.
Work hard, love hard, live hard. Bend to the work that feels like hope, because it is. It is grace.