As hard as we work
the best things in life are free
and freely given

Labor Day.

It means the end of summer to some of us, the beginning of our favorite season to others, and with the beginning of the school year, an almost universal feeling of return to days of deeper and more profound labor.

The Haiku Milieu event at FitzGerald’s this past Friday was itself a celebration of labor, the kind of labor you are born to, but have to choose over and over again.

Do anything you do with love, and it becomes an art.  Cooking? Yes. Listening to a friend? Yes. Cleaning? Debatable, but likely yes. Done with love, these things are all an artistic practice.

And what is an artistic practice but a kind of prayer, a hymn to the great, loving, irrepressible and irresistible calling of one wild beloved thing to another, the call of all of creation to each of us, saying, take what you’ve been given.  Here, it’s FREE!  And make some thing of it. 

Make something beautiful! Make something ugly!  Make something life affirming, make some thing challenging!

Embrace what you have been given, and turn it into something. 

Do it again and again, wielding it like a scythe through the wilderness of EVERYTHING.

All that you asked for that didn’t turn out the way you expected.

All the things you didn’t ask for, and don’t know what to do with.

And all the things that went way better than you dared to dream they could go.

Making anything -- make that, laboring intentionally and with love -- makes finding the path of joy easier, even if nothing makes it easier to follow.

To our labors, my dear friends, and always with love, Jenny