recreation can be work

work

I wonder about work:

I tend to call teaching my work,

the job I do that pays the bills

and where my efforts can make a positive difference

in the world, in how well kids I teach

can come into the fullness of the power

within the soul of who they are--

I help pull off a play

within which scores of kids

find a light within them and release it,

and somehow an almost living thing

comes into itself on stage,

the enablers believe and logistics come together,

the actors believe and the story throbs alive,

the audience believes and delights in it all,

so that almost like in alchemy

what could be common transforms into gold,

and each person in the production feels worth

in being a part of what has come to be,

in drama, in reading, in writing, in history, in science,

I have a gift and I can see who is before me,

and, more often than I can see how,

I call the best within them forward,

and something new and wonderful breaks free

of what tries to block it,

to short circuit and deny the power’s productive release,

I think of teaching as a calling, 

a work to which I am drawn

because I hear what can be

if it but has a chance to be born,

teaching as work centers me,

thrills me, focuses me,

and just seems right,

yet the socialness of it all exhausts me,

there’s an introvert within me I push away

while I act out the extrovert,

the one wired to others, connected to connection,

so I have to slip away to the mountains by myself,

here where I am not as much called to do, and more to be,

here where my work is to ground myself in the first stories,

as rock, water, and air build a stage

upon which life does its thing,

I think up here I’m relaxing and recovering,

I question, though, how much what I do here is also work,

a grounding without which I cannot function well,

my work might then be adrift with no sureness

of the calls within and without.



by Henry Walker

February 27, ’13