Being Local

Something felt wrong.  I’d awakened at 2 A.M. and for some reason found myself online researching how to establish a merchant account with Visa and MasterCard.  With two Art Fairs on my calendar, I wanted to begin to find out what would be required for me to accept credit card payment for my woodworking.  The complexity gave me the sense that I was making a wrong turn.  After poking around in it for awhile (picture a six year-old pushing his eggplant around his plate, hoping to distribute it widely enough to make it disappear) I went back to bed.  My mind was disturbed by the idea of generating business.  You can take a peek, if you like, at the start of my website, but it is clear to me that I’ve started out without being clear about where I’m going.  (click for a link to my website)

What I know is that I love working with wood.  And I love delighting customers.  I just don’t like finding them.  When I got online to explore this credit card business, I soon learned that I’d be paying a monthly fee for services, and that made me think about the burden of justifying that cost with steady business.  For me, entr –epre-neur is a series of four-letter words.  An entrepreneur is someone who literally takes something between the one who makes is and the one who needs it.  And for an artist/craftsman, this means becoming a second person, the person who finds customers, motivates them, and makes the transaction.  One more four-letter word: Ughh!  When I went back to bed, I realized the distaste that I had in that way of “generating business”.  I felt the tension in my body, lying in bed but not relaxed.  

I found myself drawn back to an old practice, a prayer that has for years relaxed me. 

Take, Lord, all my liberty;

Accept in their entirety my memory, my intellect, and my will.

Since everything I have has come from you,

I give it all back to you;

Use it according to your will.

As for me, give me only your love and your grace.

With these I have enough, and need nothing more.

I never got past the first line of this Prayer of Ignatius, the Suscipe:  ALL my liberty!  Retired now, I am at liberty.  I am free from the requirement of daily work, from a job.  So much liberty!  That was the problem, I thought; what do I do with it? 

Something felt right.  I don’t know how long after saying that line all of the mental gymnastics went on, but I found myself remembering a dream that I'd had for my retirement.  I’d read the book Joshua, A Parable for Today by Joseph Girzone.  (Click for a link)  In fact, I’d read it on my last retreat at Manresa.  At that point, retirement was still a longing in me, a couple of years away.  Joshua was a Jesus character, come back to the planet as promised.  He came as a carpenter, moving into a little house on the edge of the town, from which he served the people of the town by his trade.  He fixed broken things, built what people needed, and took in pay what they had to share.  He lived simply, worked happily, and was loved.  Something felt very right.

I have written repeatedly of the value of reflecting on our day, of noticing what felt right in our hearts, and what felt wrong.  Sometimes there is such a strong contrast between the rught feeling and the wrong feeling that we know that we need to do something to move toward what we know is rught for us.  For me, today will be a day of considering how I will do that – be more like Joshua and less like the online merchant.  I already have the wood and the tools.  All I need is to trust that the love and the Grace are indeed sufficient, as they have always been.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.