Satisfaction with Cuts

One of my many musings is about the migration of our society from agrarian to urban. A less-populated America was based solidly in the country with reliance on the city for tradesmen, few merchants and even fewer degreed professionals. Metropolitan hubs held less influence, and everyone was a bit more thankful for their daily bread.

If you stretched a bit of Tolkien's allegory, Hobbits could be inferred to represent a society that used-to-be. A love of good-tilled earth. Food and drink. Playing games and jesting. This could be an apt description of a people all but gone from the landscape of today's heritage where corporate farms do more to feed us than the labor of families. The simple folk who worked hard and died old were dependent on the land, the weather, and ultimately -- their God -- for every iota of their existence...and provided subsistence for those that would find their employ anywhere but the farm.

Over the past 30 years, this transition has occurred. We've become amazingly efficient agriculturally. The work of 100 families can be done by 15 laborers with better technology and machinery today. These are good things. But what's been lost?

For one, people believe that there is no need to rely on anything but themselves. Farming communities were just that: Communities. People that help each other, know each other, fight with each other, love each other. But the topic of community would be better explored another day. It is but one of the considerations of things lost.

Another is the ease with which we dismiss these essential elements in allowing us to meander after our own pursuits. The suburbanites of today exist with the only worries about what to do with their next paycheck and the upcoming weekend. The gains in agricultural productivity have afforded an even greater number in our society who can instead invest time in the study of every possible distraction without giving thought to their next meal. As such, many have become jaded towards the same foundational reliance upon good labor, good land and good weather for their existence. Most importantly, it's allowed us to forget the existence of a Creator who provide for us.

So what does this all have to do with cuts?

This past weekend, I spent a considerable amount of time in trying to hunt for deer, for preparing my tractor for the winter, cutting down dead trees and fallen branches, cutting down a tree for Christmas, and in cleaning out a large shed I built with my own hands. I look at my hands now -- which have been in the soil, sawdust, oil, dirt, pine tar -- and see cuts. Lots of them. All but one of them came without my knowing it. A half-dozen scars on my hands with immovable darkness in the crevasses of my fingers that will only come out in time.

And it feels good.

It is satisfying to be able to look at the individual work of my hands. To know that THIS is a reflection of the Creator who gives me these opposable digits for use in things that go beyond the comfort of a computer, and sheltered office and a chair. It serves as a reminder to me that every endeavor of meaning comes with some bloodshed -- and that my very comfort is purchased with the sacrifice of others that raise food so I don't have to.

Most importantly, it is reminder that is only an arms-length away.

It reminds me that in the deluge of efficiency, the simplest of things can be forgone and forgotten. It reminds me that when we strip away all of our machinery and technology, all of our education and current philosophies, all of the trivialities, trials and tribulations of our lives today, we are still dependent -- all of us -- on Maslow's base-level physiological hierarchy.

Faith in things unseen -- like that we're still relying on good labor, good land, good weather, and the Love of a good God to provide. Whether we see it or not, it is there. Without it, pretty much everything else would not matter.

And in this reminder, I take great satisfaction in these cuts of my labor-worn hands.