Monday we tried to get stuff done. Honestly we did. And some things got done, like school, bread baking, feeding the hooligans, etc. These are all good things, but they are not satisfying in the way that building infrastructure is. If you feed the hooligans today, you have nothing to show for it except a bunch of hooligans tomorrow who will be hangry anyway and (worse) have an expectation of being fed.
If you stick a post in the ground, or plant a tree, or build a hugel bed, well… tomorrow you will see that there is in fact a post in the ground, or a tree growing (unless some critter got to it) or a hugel bed ready to be planted. It just seems more permanent.
But this is an illusion.
We do not feed the kids in order to build farms. We build farms in order to feed kids. All of the infrastructure we are working on establishing in this place is ordered towards the day when the infrastructure will be established, and we will then not have big “permanent” jobs to do, but rather the work will be the daily round of disappearing chores: moving the stock, feeding the stock, collecting the eggs; planting, weeding, harvesting, preserving; breeding, raising, slaughtering and butchering;
All of this outside work oriented to the most vanishing of all works, that of ordering a home: feeding, cleaning, laundering, etc.
And all of that oriented to the downright invisible tasks of relationships, ranging from the invisible, but at least somewhat measurable tasks of education, to the utterly ineffable task of loving.
The more important the work, the less visible it is, the more it needs to be re-done every day, or even every hour.
Or perhaps a better way to put it would be that we are invited into it with greater frequency and regularity, because it is more important, closer to heaven.
And in the end we will be faced with the utterly permanent reality of the human souls that we have loved and raised, and assisted in shaping for good or ill, to be an honor and a beauty, an eternal weight of glory and a crown of righteousness for all eternity.
And the perfectly fastened fence post will rust into a pile of red ash, and eventually be crunched into a black hole, and forgotten.
