das loft

There's something about being a farm apprentice/farmer that I find very fulfilling. Part of it may be simply that I am working closely with nature while learning a lot about meeting one of our most basic needs, food, literally from the ground up. But it's more than that. I'm reading The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, and in it she describes life in an indigenous community, the Yequana tribe, in South America. The Yequana have no word for "work". From their perspective, there is no difference between "work" and "leisure" - it's all one and the same activity. Here at Everdale, I too am having a harder time differentiating between "work" and "leisure". As an intern, I feel a sense of ownership of the place. I find that my motivation for doing "work" is not so much because someone told me to do it, but because I know it has to be done in order to ensure the community's - and thus my own - prosperity. So I find myself doing after-hours much of what many would consider to be "work". At a normal "job", you would normally count those hours as "overtime". Even here, interns are encouraged to keep track of whatever hours we work past the daily minimum (10) so they can be banked for "time off" another day. But for me, that seems kind of silly. It doesn't make much sense to me to count the hours I spend weeding or harvesting from the Biointensive garden in the evening as work. I did those things of my own accord because they had to be done, and it's fun.

Should it not be the goal of every person to find a way of making a living that makes a distinction between "work" and "leisure" meaningless?

Labels: everdale