work and food

eating dinner is the main event of our farming lives.  while we were eating tonight, reveling in the sunset and the wonder of having made twenty delicious meals in a row, it occurred to me that when your days are centered around what you eat, it makes for very happy days.  maybe this is the virtue behind the family dinner, the nightly meal, smelt for hours and enjoyed with the ritual consistency rivaled by few other daily behaviors.  maybe bowel movements.  but these become much more religious with the regularity of the daily meals.  

this is the most profound privilege of living and working here.  quite directly we are working for food.  food and a place to eat it.  there seems to be a simple happy equation that pops out of this.  my particular arrangement right now is unique in its simplification of the whole thing.

work==>food + a place to eat it.  

when you can actually see how these processes are related to each other there is a profound happiness.  i don't have that many words for describing happiness.  its that transparent eye kind of thing.  all of my time is spent in this wonderful little equation.  

...

now that i pause and look at it.  the equation doesn't seems make much sense.  i'm going to smoke a cigarette and think about it.

...

ok so maybe it makes more sense with overlapping circles.  if one circle is food and another is place, the overlap between them, the activity that allows them to co-arise is work.  now work is a fairly arbitrary choice hear but i've like to idealize the term.  think of it in a capital "w", Work sense.  the enactment of sustainability.  Work.  

when your work is growing food, there aren't a whole lot of other overlapping circles in the equation.  of course everything overlaps out to the infinite, so that this place and this food is connected to the millions of places that provide the seeds of its existence.  but the more direct you make the relationship, the less capital that needs to be exchanged, the more sustaining and sustainable it is.  

well things get kind of complicated when you try to tease them out into diagrams and equations.  let me try again.

eating the food that i work to sustain makes me feel really good.