Thoughts About Work

The nation celebrates Labor Day in early September. In a time of record unemployment, having a job and doing good work is really something to be thankful about. And reflective. So, here are some words by wise people that invite reflection in this Labor Day season.

• No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tiling a field as in writing a poem.  ~Booker T. Washington
  
  
• If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship—and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular “good.” When I try to do something that is not in my nature or the nature of the relationship, way will close behind me…when the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself, and me, even as I give it away. ~Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  
  
• The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. ~Marge Piercy, To Be of Use
  
  
• Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. As artists we work every day. We make our own lives every day; we care for our family every day. It is hard daily work, this creative process. To dream about painting and not also to work at it doesn’t ever bring about a painting. To dream about creating a new world that is not teetering on the edge of total destruction and not to work at it doesn’t make a peaceful world. So it is important that we are creative people working daily on the greater picture as well, bringing to it all our skills of imagination and making. ~Corita Kent, Learning by Heart
  
  
• One sign that God may be calling is a certain restlessness, a certain dissatisfaction with things as they are. Other signs of God’s call may be a sense of longing, yearning or wondering; a feeling of being at a crossroads; a sense that something is happening in one’s life, that one is wrestling with an issue or decision; a sense of being in a time of transition; or a series of circumstances that draw one into a specific issue. ~Suzanne Farnham, Listening Hearts

I hope you have a wonderful Labor Day. I will see you at the “True Labor” Place this Sunday!