In the deep woods, we pass by a very old stone wall, most of it tumbling down and crumbling back into the earth, the wall no longer something to stand on, to keep the cows and sheep inside. Fate, who seems to know no boundaries or walls, loves to hop on the wall and walk across the top of it for long ways, hopping from one stone to another, never knocking one over or disturbing it. How can she do this, we wonder? I shouldn’t think a squirrel could do it, but Fate goes where she wants, missing nothing, knows every single stone.
The morning sun hits the corner of the porch and white-washes it, the elements of the porch stand out, even on a cold day the porch looks almost tropical. Red waits to go into the house, Minnie and Flo clean themselves and preen in theri box, our old “Books” sign hangs in its place, and Ed Gulley’s chair has joined the line-up on the porch. I am fond of this corner of the porch, I think it could almost be in Havana.
A young woman named Cynthia got in touch with me recently and said she wants to be a singer, she wants it more than anything. Her parents, grandparents, guidance counselor, teacher, friends – everyone around her – are sympathetic and patronizing at the same time. They think it’s a cute idea, they think it’s a phase. They are singing the age old song of the weary, the worn down and the cynical: get a good job, pay for good health insurance, save for retirement. It’s a rough world out there, get a day job and have fun with your keyboard at night.
Move away from here, they all say, as quick as you can, there is nothing for you here, no future, no security. So at 18, Cynthia is at the fork in the road. One way leads to her calling, the other to a job.
This is what we tell our children here, almost everyone does. Get away, break your connection to family, community, your true calling, lose your ties to nature, the land, to food, to the natural world, to the sacred idea of community.
I live in rural life, the forgotten heart and soul of America in some ways, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the discarded heart and soul of the country. Some workers have always had it rough, everywhere, but the discarded worker is something new on so grand a scale. Discarded workers are not a casualty of work, they are work.
Billionaires are not concerned with what we do here in rural America, governors do not show up with spanking regional business plans, nobody bothers to come and buy off our civic leaders. The titans of corporate America do not covet us for the marketplace, marketers have no interest in reaching us, the politicians and economists have left us behind. In the vast spaces between the coasts, jobs and young people and children have been herded together, in vast encampments that make up the cities. In rural America, we do not fit comfortably into the new global economy.
We are not, as they say, efficient. We are not team players in the global workforce.
A hundred years ago the small towns and cities in my region – in almost every region – were booming, filled with small businesses, taverns, inns, bustling family farms, slate mills, sheep farms, shops, workshops. People were merchants, haulers, they worked at grain and feed companies, they worked with animals like horses. Employment was unheard of, people generally did not have jobs here, they were called to different kinds of work – farming, the booming merchant business, mills and factories, work as artisans or craftspeople.
People did not have jobs, they had callings, vocations, trades. Farms.
Industrialization and its bastard spawn globalization, changed rural life for good. Family farms are rapidly dying off, the small towns are filled with empty storefronts, almost all of the cities are in the process of dying, their Main Streets emptied by giant chain stores, their farms put under by corporate agribusiness on a staggering scale. And absolutely nobody cares.
You can watch 100 presidential debates, and nobody will ever mention rural life and the struggles of its people to keep their communities and way of life alive.
Political leaders talk about the importance of creating “jobs,” but they never speak in any way about the idea of work as a calling or vocation or lifestyle or tradition or vocational choice.
“A “job,” writes poet and author Wendell Berry, “exists without reference to anybody in particular or anyplace in particular.” If someone leaves my small town of Cambridge, N.Y., and moves to Boston or New York City, it makes no difference where or what his “job” is, or whether he loves it or hates it, or what has been lost or gained. He is counted as employed, he goes into the weekly government stat sheet, everyone involved – government, economists, statisticians – can wipe their hands of him and the quality of his life and work.
In rural America, the old-timers can still recall the many owners of small farms, shops, and stories, and the self-employed craftspeople who were thriving here as recently as World War II. They didn’t think of themselves as having a “job,” they thought of themselves as having callings or crafts. No farmer ever says farming is his “job,” he says it is his life. I think of Bridget Ahearn, our independent and much-loved pharmacist, recently bought out by a big chain, forced out by the competition from giant corporations.
Bridget never said she had a job, she said she was a pharmacist, and when pharmacists were wiped out by Wal-Mart’s predatory and cheap prescriptions, pharmacists were further pressured byinsurance companies, giant pharmaceuticals and vast government bureaucracies. Bridget, who said the “art of the pharmacist” had died, done in by CVS and Walgreen’s, she finally gave up and sold out. Nobody blamed her, her life-long profession had become just another job run by computers, she was just another statistic in the government reports.
The pharmacists and shopkeepers and merchants and craftspeople have mostly all been driven out, like Bridget, all replaced by a few people working in box and chain stories using large machines, computer systems and other new technologies that replace people.
Rural economies, rural families, rural communities, in which people lived and worked as members and friends, have been shattered by the politicians and economists. Their ties have been broken, their notions of work demolished and replaced by the corporate idea of what work is.
And what, exactly, is the new work? In Silicon Valley, it is one thing, for most people, like those in Amazon’s infamous warehouses, it is quite another. The new work demands of its employees that they either be exploited by their employers – worked harder and harder for fewer rewards and benefits, and less security, or discarded, perhaps the most powerful and appropriate work to describe the job.
In rural communities, we may or may not love one another, but we are still balking at the idea of discarding each other like trash. When one falls, we rush to help them up. It seems that every week or so the Knights of Columbus or American Legion are mowing someone’s lawn, raising money for a sick held, helping to rebuild a burned-out home. Bridget made sure people got their meds, one way or another. People in jobs can’t do that.
I don’t like telling other people what to do, but I have held many jobs and answered some callings. When asked, I tell others that work ought to be a calling. When people tell the young that singers and artists and writers starve, and can’t make a living they have embraced the very same ethos that shuttered those booming towns and destroyed the very idea of true and real work. They replaced the love of work with the fear of not having jobs.
It is okay to try and fail, I told Cynthia. For me, the sad thing is to not even try to be happy.
Follow your heart, I said. I have met a lot of old and sick people in my hospice work, I don’t know one of them that doesn’t regret giving up what they loved for what they believed was safe. I don’t know one who feels secure in the places they were told they must spending their lives trying to get to. There is one thing that every older person learns and knows, it is universal belief: life is short, it is an awful thing to waste it.
I see people who live a life of fear and obligation, only to find out that safety comes from love and meaning and peace of mind, not a lifetime spend in “jobs” doing work one hates for people who care nothing for you. This is the message of the discarded people, the ghostly echo of work. Follow your bliss. Do what you love.
