To pray is to work, to work is to pray. Orare est Laborare, Laborare est Orare. For the last two days I've been building earthen ramps into the barn for the pigs and goats. The doors to the areas for the animals are about three feet off the ground. There must have been wooden ramps there at one time that rotted away.
So I built a frame out of free pallet wood and scraps from around the farm. Then I've been filling it in with stone and broken concrete. Then covering it with dirt and gravel. The pig ramp has been a special pain in the butt because it is at an angle that I can't dump the loader into. I have to shovel the rock and gravel into the loader, then dump it and shovel it again into place. The goat ramp I will be able to dump directly into. Hard work!
I taught this morning before working on the ramps. After twenty years of teaching, I'm not used to working hard with my hands. It feels good, but I am sore. Not that I've been a couch potato or anything. It's just that the exercise I have gotten has been hiking, and hunting, and fishing, and backpacking. Shoveling rock is a whole different thing.
Did I mention it was raining. Didn't really bother me much. It wasn't raining hard. Just enough to say to yourself, "Self, you are shoveling rock in the rain in February."
But really, it was very meditative. It's hard to be distracted by worldly clamors when you are working outdoors. I wasn't worried about money or pride or responsibility. I just was.
And now the pigs have a way to get into their nice warm home.
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I love that feeling! The feeling of just being.
ReplyDeleteI so agree, the garden is for me a place of forgetting things and getting my mind settled on happier paths. Work in any form is good for the soul. :)
ReplyDeleteGot seeds in the mail yesterday. We will be starting tomatoes and peppers soon.
ReplyDeleteIts just a little early to start those here in SC. I do have a couple hundred cooler season plants started though. Tomorrow I'm thinking I'll finally be able to move some of them to the cold frames outside and start my peas and spinach in the garden. We've been too cold before this.
ReplyDeleteWe start the tomatoes early and re-pot them so they are as big as we can get them before May 15h. We are in N. Idaho.
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