Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 5)

Planning - i

Turning Toward What We Want...Withdrawing From What We Don't

True individuality can only be born of unprescribed collectivity (“freely-associated individuals”), of a popularly-created totality – that…wholeness to which its individualities relate as the larger expression of themselves, and from which they derive their wholeness. Without that larger totality which is our voluntary creation even more than we are the creations of it, we are not wholes, but rather only isolated fragments of Fear. In such a condition we cannot develop into individualities. In this we are no different from all social animals, and in our oneness with all animals there is no shame, but only great joy. (Journal entry, September 25, 1981)

 

In our Plan, there are the things we agree to do in a crisis, and the things we agree to do every day. But every thing we do, every positive action, every thought, leads out, out the door and on to better things.
Your crew is not your tribe. Your community is not your culture. But that don’t matter. They are the folks you work with to get the job done because you’re in the same place at the same time. You’ll find your tribe later. But now there’s a job to do and you have to help.

A year ago I made an implicit promise to my neighborhood when I planted our traffic circle. So you can imagine my feelings of guilt as I sit here typing these words while the sun streams in, the warmed earth smells of renewal, and the plum and peach blossoms announce the arrival of spring.

Maybe it’s the unknown ailments I wrestle with every day, plowing a sense of urgency, that supercedes guilt and keeps me laboring over a keyboard instead of a shovel – or maybe my body and the earth are in sync in our distress and the urgency that calls me is only too real.

But I don’t think it’s illusion to believe, to know, that when we psychically let this system go, the shift will be so much easier than we’d reason to hope.
The earth calls. It does. Seeds just wanna do that thing. The sun is so sweet.

I’ve no doubt at all that, once we make our plans, our feet will easily find the paths that return us to, and return to us, our power.

All to say, I long to be out there digging weeds, planting the traffic circle, leaning on my plum tree and thanking it, once again, for her food.

And while I know it will require many more acts of resistance than planting a communal plot to win for us our future without bosses, communal food is no small thing.

And once you’ve joined with that fate-assigned-few who want to wake up with you, you’ll find in yourself a previously untapped creativity that generates endless things to do. What could be more fun than that?

Thoreau told us that when “new, universal, and more liberal laws…begin to establish themselves around [us]…in proportion as [we] simplify [our lives,]” that, then, “the laws of the universe…will appear less complex,” and “solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

In the same way, ‘wage work’ will no longer be ‘wage work.’ It will be “what I have to do for now,” while to your real work you give your full power, focus, commitment, and love. When you stop seeking the approval of a system that despises you, sooner or later it will fall away like the dead husk it is, as surely as the phoenix rises from the fire, and the butterfly from its’ chrysalis.

So do not despise small acts. Small changes do lead to big ultimate effects, if you make them with consciousness. Whether it’s digging up a lawn to plant food for the spirit-starved children in your neighborhood, or convening a gathering to pose the question, “what future do we want?” Once you stop trying to rise above your fellows at work, once you set the competition aside, and turn your attention to what your body wants to do, you’ll find the energy required to do it. “The process of reclamation starts with our bodies, and our children’s bodies.” We can begin by taking ourselves, our art, our questions, seriously. It is our wholeness speaking.

No one else can tell you what work you’re here to do.

The job, wage work, is the linchpin of a very insidious cycle of abuse – pull it out and the whole mechanism collapses.

We all know, if only unconsciously, that our lives are being stolen. And so we feel entitled to the “Compensatory Cheap Thrill of Consumption.” But this thrill is not really cheap – it only seems so because the extorted labor is concealed by the appearance of the commodity itself. Performing our assigned role as “consumers on autopilot” makes us complicit with the abuse – of ourselves and of the unseen workers who produce the commodities we buy. We have to face unvarnished the price of our “addiction to convenience” – or rather the illusion of ‘convenience.’

Our consumption maintains the cycle of abuse and the cycle of abuse compels our consumption.

Not long ago I listened to an interview with an author talking about how to insure that the food we eat is supported by, and supports, a healthy and sustainable food system. The author emphasized the importance of buying directly from local farmers. It was a listener-call-in program and a woman called to say that the last time she considered buying produce directly from a farmer at a local street market the green beans being offered were $3.99 a pound. She turned around and went to a Safeway and found green beans for ninety-nine cents a pound.

“I’m glad we have a system that brings me green beans for only ninety-nine cents a pound,” she said.

The author replied that that seemingly low price disguised the true cost: the cost to the workers and consumers exposed to pesticides; the cost to the workers of slave wages; the cost to the health system to treat those workers and consumers; the cost to the planet of the unbearable toxic load, on top of the costs of global warming due to the excess fossil fuels needed to truck or ship the product out, or in the pesticides themselves; the cost to our souls of our disconnection from the earth; the cost to our understanding of the complexity of ecosystems… (I added those last two.)

There is a larger ‘Reckoning’ that we all have a responsibility to see to, because there is a larger ‘Debt.’ We have to withdraw from the corporations, peer into the false face, and return to reality, to the world around us right now: the ancestors, the earth, and to each other. From these sources come our food, our shelter, our clothing, our joy, and – most importantly – our awakening.

We put our values in our Plan
that we implement with our hands –
tied to a movement,
tied to a mass,
that one day soon
will free us.

The trivialization and diminishment of manual work is one of the sources of our enslavement, so re-valuing manual work is one of the keys to freedom. The podrunks know that in reality the hand is everything: our food…you know the list. Everything. Because our hand is key to our freedom a mass of millennia has gone into the myth that the hand is nothing, while Mind is All. What a con.

To say that the con worked is an understatement. Podrunk propaganda tells us to despise the laborer, the migrant worker, the factory grunt. And all too often we obligingly concur, even to the extent of despising ourselves…but not construction workers.

When I was trying to break into the trades, following A’s advice, as I’d learned it was wise to do, I asked another woman-electrician, S, if I could be her “summer helper.” This was a special category of worker the union recognized, usually inhabited by teenagers – sort of pre-apprentices – created probably to accommodate the children of the union brothers and sisters, to expose them to the work and give them a little income over the summer. It paid the same as the first bracket apprentice level.

I was over forty-five, had been to college, and I’d filled my share of professional shoes, but it never occurred to me that my becoming an electrician’s “summer helper” could be interpreted as a misstep and consequent downward plunge through a trap-door called “Defective”. Certainly no one could think this who’d worked with A, as I had, and seen the skill required to do the work she did. And A spoke of S with such a reverent tone, that I was convinced she must be the most masterful electrician who ever carved light out of darkness.

Arriving at her home late, at 7:10 AM, and already sweaty with anxiety over it, I found her waiting in the company van, clearly peeved.

“I was about to leave,” she said grimly, not needing to spell out the implications of that sad event.

I apologized profusely, climbed into the passenger seat, and off we went. The mission that morning was to make magic happen for a company housed in an office building in YouNameTheOutskirts. My naiveté caused me to bubble with enthusiasm. I was like a puppy with S, or an infant, babbling away to help cushion the little space that was ours. She, on the other hand, was a woman of few words, not to say cold, and the confidences we shared tended to be spare and relevant, on her side at least. I tend to easily veer off point when making chit-chat, an unfortunate side-effect of problem-shyness.

My job was to be the brute labor, hauling out the tools, ladder and whatnot to make a smooth path for her brain to function freely, with unencumbered focus. She was completely intimidating with her confidence and competence. When I see that combination in someone I always marvel, having never known exactly what that feels like.

We journeyed up to the third floor to scope out the lay of the land – which generally involves tracking down the electrical room – and our first sight as we stepped off the elevator was the reception desk with the usual suspect stowed stiff-leggedly behind it. Blond, young, attractive, well-coiffed and clothed, she regarded S as she would a brown smear on her shoe. I later learned that this young woman’s response to a construction worker was typical, particularly among the white-collared, but at the time I was surprised by it. After all, S probably earned four or five times what this young woman did, and isn’t money the gauge by which everything is measured in class society?

It seems that once the podrunk predators pitch their cons, their nets for all we dispossessed – Western Rationalism being the largest and most widely flung – the vulnerable rush in, respond to the duck call: “come fly with us above the rest, above the common mob unblessed.”

Podrunk propaganda would have it that those of us who work with our hands are brutes, that it’s a phenomenon worthy of the carny when we open our mouths and speak. For those swayed by this con the terms “Western Thought” and ‘thought’ are synonymous. And yet, look where we are – on the brink of destruction, destroying each other, and the planet.

Perhaps it’s time we thought with our hearts and hands instead of our heads – especially as what we do with our hands will make us a mass, and only a mass will free us.

The mass movement, therefore, is our true work, because only general freedom will support individual freedom – and vice versa.

To develop a meaningful mass, one of substance, one of weight, it’s important we physically meet and greet. So the second stage of The Plan, after seeing reality, is to begin reaching out to others around you, in your physical environments, in order to begin planning for local – i.e. both village and micro-village level – self-sufficiency. The ideas that follow are suggestions for how to begin.

We’re only as good as the system we surround ourselves with – so how good do we want to be? Granted, we were consumed before we could say a word about it and we’ll have to tunnel out.

…Best grab a shovel…and dig.

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 6

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)