Eden Hall Farm: Response 5

Ten years ago I could run two miles in twelve minutes. I could muscle out around seventy-five push ups and just shy of a hundred sit ups. I was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, only a couple years removed from basic training. I played softball, flag football, ultimate Frisbee…I was in peak physical condition. In fact, only two years before, I’d out run the German Polizei. But that’s another story for another time. I’m writing this because the other day at Eden Hall Farm, moving several tons of dirt around, shoveling it in and out of wheelbarrows, I felt my age and lack of conditioning.

Not that the work was all that difficult, or that I got winded, but I felt it, more so than I’ve felt in a while. Probably the last time I worked like that was helping my brother dig post holes for the deck he built. We used a mechanized auger, which you would think might make the job easier…I almost think we should have dug them by hand. Regardless, that’s some real work, physical labor. It puts into perspective the kind of thing I do for a living…sit at a desk, shuffle around a carpeted (occasionally tiled) floor, pushing buttons on this thing and that, scratching reminders on sticky notes. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get to crawl under a desk and unplug something, that gets the blood pumping. We get a lot of paper deliveries too. Moving those boxes around can work out the muscles, but at thirty-five (which includes at least fifteen years of fairly heavy beer drinking), my back is starting to give way to my front. The point, ultimately is, what is work? And I don’t mean the basic answer…doing something every day to pay the bills, that’s easy. My Uncle Lefty (owned a bowling alley, Suburban Lanes in Fairview, PA – I worked there as a pin boy for a couple weeks) had a sheet of paper pinned up in his office with this little saying (you’ve probably heard it before):

“We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”

The work I’m doing now, this creative writing, poetry, non-fiction, it’s nonetheless strenuous. I can feel myself being exercised (possibly even exorcised) as I continue to write. I’m trying not to take the same approach to a piece that I’ve taken before. I’m trying to enter the point of my work from somewhere outside its frame. Indeed, I am working, and that’s what a true writer does.

I’m realizing now that this is something I’ve been struggling over for sometime, wondering why I’m drawn to this, why I keep doing it, why sometimes, I have no choice but to put something down, but also, why quite often, I don’t. It’s easy to come up with reasons why we write: emotions balled up inside your head with little to no other outlet, opinions that you feel other people should, at the very least hear, something you thought of that made you laugh out loud, simply making a connection with somebody else. All of these are reasons to stop what you’re doing or take a few minutes in the evening to sit down and jot out a few lines of verse or a paragraph or two of prose…just like exercise. But, if you don’t do it, and do it consistently, you start to get stale, start to get stiff, start to get sore. The words get tougher to find. The dirt gets heavier. The wheelbarrow tilts. And you start to count the years until it falls.