30. LIGHT WORK

 

Last night I spoke and sang for a group of Empty Nesters, folks whose kids have grown and flown, who gather together one Monday night a month. They had shared a meal and I was the after dinner guest. When I was done the host, my friend Wynn, thanked me, then invited anyone able to stay and help clean up. He used one of my mom's most common slogans in the invitation:

Many hands make light work.

Within 20 minutes the food was cleared off the tables, chairs and tables were stacked and put away, and the floor was vacuumed. People visited as they worked. These people are used to helping each other.

A few years back, during the Covid Pandemic, I served as Relief Society President in our church congregation. The RS President oversees the women's organization in our church, a beautiful and mighty collection of women devoted to Christ and his teachings. Its one of the oldest and largest women's organizations in the world, with over 7 million members. 

While I served as president  in our Ward unit we had 19 funerals from within our congregation. The RS works to provide assistance, comfort and a meal after each funeral for the family of the deceased. Some of those luncheons served well over 100 people. I saw firsthand these words evidenced by the members of our church group. They not only emotionally nurtured the family who had lost a loved one, they planned, arranged, created, cooked, served, cleaned, and delivered... each person pitching in so that no one person was overwhelmed with any task. It was a beautiful sight to see, and served as a repeated witness to the innate goodness of mankind.  its part of how we mourn with those who mourn.

I got thinking about the term light in this adage. It serves as a double entendre', working on multiple levels. Yes, many people pitching in make jobs that seem overwhelming doable. Like in the Bible, in the book of Nehemiah chapter 3 where the walls of Jerusalem are deteriorating. Nehemiah first motivates his people to recognize the need and visualize the possibility of repairing the many gates surrounding the city. Then he organizes the people, giving them responsibility for the gates nearest their own homes. Religious leaders work beside shop owners who work beside perfume makers. It's a lovely story, telling us that things that seem impossible at first are made possible when people work together. It also tells how every person, regardless of their place in society or notable skill set, has a place in the band.

We are also reminded in scripture that the task at hand, while the impetus for the organization, can become secondary in importance. Nehemiah achieved the repair of the gates, yes... but he also rebuilt the community that was central to the city as well. 

In the process of researching the origins of the phrase "Many hands make light work" I shifted my thoughts to wanting to know the nature of light. I understand the concept of many people helping make the burden lighter, but the concept of Light itself started buzzing in my thoughts and I began a deep dive into the study of light, how it's made. Then, diving even deeper, because my ADHD brain gets a thrill out of this kind of stuff, I started pondering the creation of the world as told in Holy Scripture. 

In the simplest of terms from my unscientific brain, I understand light as the residual outcome of an energy exchange. The word photons floats to the top of this analysis, and the works of Newton, Huygens, Maxwell and Einstein explain how it works. If you don't want to get anything else done in a day, give yourself to light.

Then, because we have the capacity these days to get information at the speed of light I began a little research on the Biblical text explaining God's creation of our earth. 

And God said, let there be light. 

And it was so.

There were two days in the symbolic week of creation when God focused on light. Day one, the first light. And Day 4, the bearers of light: the sun, moon and stars. What was that basic light of the first day of creation? If it was the establishment of 24 hour cycles creating a day, then perhaps the light of the first day was time itself. Light = time. 

Whenever I visit an airport and take the moving sidewalk I imagine I'm a spirit moving along with ease at an escalated pace. Then, BAM, the escalator stops and I'm on my own, needing to use my own willpower and personal energy to get myself moving. I whisper to myself as I take that first step off a moving sidewalk onto solid, heavy ground; "I am born." No wonder we're all tired. We aren't used to all this heavy humanness.

I've long thought that the concept of time is an earthly matter.  People near and dear to me, one of whom looks and sounds an awful lot like me, suffer from some measure of time blindness. (It's a thing... ask AI to give you a synopsis.) Our souls come into our bodies unfamiliar with the concept of time. We who have nursed and nurtured babies through the wee hours of the night are fully aware of this. Some people adapt to the concept of time more easily than others, and we sadly punish those who don't. We should do better at celebrating our diversity. Not long from now we will all die and time will lose its power anyway.

The idea of many hands making light work can not only be interpreted to mean that many people working together can make a hard job easier, it can also mean that our diversity, our uniqueness and personal perspective combines with that of others to create the power source that fuels our very existence. We will dim into nothingness if we allow isolation. It is apparent that the Opposer to all good things is trying to make that happen. Just watch a group of people who used to interface with each other in a room these days. See their heads bent over their devices, their thumbs tapping the glass on their tiny fake Urim and Thumims. I am guilty as well. But awareness is the first step toward change. We need each other.

So here I am now, a whole day of not much else done behind me, but a lot of new information swirling in my brain. It's ok. When I leave this realm, with its strange fixation on time, I will take this new knowledge with me, and a clean kitchen counter will be of no consequence at all.

LABEL

April 3, 2009 label
Tonight was one of those nights a grandma dreams of on quiet winter mornings, when all she has to look forward to is the piles of disorganization staring her in the face, along with perhaps a batch of laundry and unloading the dishwasher. Sarah and Dave arrived with Timo and Anna Bella., having driven all 18 hours straight from Kansas City. It happened to be our great fortune that John and Ashley were given a pair of Jazz basketball tickets by the generous Casey and Keisha Hill, so we also got to have Sophie, Parker and baby Ruby with us as well. I should have turned on a recorder just to preserve the noise. When a house like this gets that kind of noise again, its walls sort of shiver and stretch and wake up. If they could talk they would speak like the tree in the book The Giving Tree, saying “Come boy, come play in my hallways and bounce on my couches and I will shelter you and be your friend.” That’s what I think these walls would say.
As the night wore on we loaded Horton Hears a Who into the DVD player and laid a row of pillows and blankets on the family room floor. I popped some popcorn and they attempted to lie still for about 13 minutes. Parker finally jumped up and came over to me where I was sitting in the old Pennsylvania rocking chair. He was wiggling in his baseball pajamas, reaching up behind his back and trying to grab at something near his neck. “Take it off, Gummy”, he said through his Binky. I reached in and felt two layers of labels at the neck of his PJ’s. One was satiny and soft, but the one underneath was stiff and irritating, so I grabbed it with my fingers and gave it a good tug, making sure I did not damage the fabric when I removed it. “Fank oo Gummy”, he said, and went back to his bowl of popcorn. Why do they put those kind of labels in clothing? I mean, seriously, what normal feeling kind of person wants that there? Parker’s daddy was really a label maniac. He had to have every label taken off his clothes, and I am not talking at the age of 12. I mean, when he was one year old, and on. His favorite shirt was that thin green 7 UP shirt of Libby’s, which came down to his knees when he first started wearing it. It was soft, thin and had no labels. I think it is perfectly correct that John was opposed to labels from the womb. The philosopher in him still hates them.
For three years I was blessed to serve the women in the Davis County Jail as a friend and teacher, every Sunday and Wednesday night. I served with Carol Cluff, a sister-heart to this day; and Val Darnell, the same; and Ruth Barker of the poet’s heart. Then when Carol was released as Relief Society President they called me to fill her position and Mary Silver joined us. Those were cherished years. It is likely the only time I will serve as Relief Society president effectively. We did not have Visiting Teaching. We didn’t have Compassionate Service Committees, nor Enrichment nights. We were not even allowed to take stapled papers into the jail because the inmates would remove the staples from the paper, sharpen them on the cement in their small recreation room, then mix toothpaste and pencil lead together so they could tattoo their knuckles and ankles. It was a unique sisterhood I served, and I loved it. One Valentines Day I got special permission from our Deputy to bring in some markers and Valentines cards and candy hearts. The ladies were so excited, you’d have thought we were in third grade on Valentines Day! We dragged the tables to the middle of the room and set up a Valentines Bingo game. As I stood at the end of the table and looked at these women, I asked them to pause for just a moment and look at the door to the media room, where we held our meetings. Taped to the window on that door was a black plastic garbage bag, put there to keep the male inmates in the Delta Echo pod from gawking at the women when they filed past as they went to the courtyard to play basketball. They were gross, crude and lude, and it broke my heart just feeling the bad energy they gave off trying to get a look at a piece of flesh draped in stiff orange uniforms and cheap slip-on tennis shoes. So that black garbage bag got taped up a few years back. I walked over to the door and announced, “Sisters, we are not garbage!” I tore the garbage bag off the door and the women all stood and whooped and clapped. Some of them stood on their chairs union style. I drew from my bag a piece of lace, sewn to the size of that window, and we ceremoniously hung it on the door. We tore that ugly black label off the door of that prison of a place. Softened the fiber of their temporary existence, and whispered to them that in spite of the ugliness of that environment, and the starkness of the situation, we could make of it something more than society tries to impose. One of the sisters sat in her seat and wept, likely tired from fighting, though I want to think it was because she saw a hint of gentleness in a harsh circumstance. I loved those women. I still pray for them. I pray they will have to courage to remove their own labels from their lives, and that they will replace the ugly with a swath of gentleness.