Working with Heart

Crafting a Spirited Workplace

“I went from the streets of a great Western City, full of towering houses, terrific and deafening noises, into the quiet halls of an ethnographical museum…and came into the rooms where there were many objects from the East, representing the arts and crafts of Asia and the Pacific…I could almost smell the sandalwood and champak flower.  Life itself came from the things in the room which Eastern hands had held so close and fashioned so carefully and tenderly.  Life had been put into the fabrics and carvings of wood, and life emanated subtly out of them, again like a perfume, a soft glow, warm and strangely thrilling after the iron streets of the Western City.”

                           Mohandas Gandhi

         The essence of craft is to make something with attention to detail and with a love of the material.  There is a man in our community who spent his working life making films for children.  He now spends his retirement years producing amazing wood structures---beautiful tables with ballerina legs, chairs with faces and clocks with silly tongues or cat tails for the pendulum.  His creations have the same whimsical quality as his films, but the wood is sanded to perfection and smoothed into curves and whirls, and sometimes contains layered, inlaid wood.  The end product is gorgeous and at the same time, laughable.  Clearly, he loves what he does and pours that happy energy to everything he lays his hands to. 

         I hear so many people talk about their workplaces in terms that cannot be considered loving.  They are frustrated, angry and resentful and describe their work as exhausting, boring, ridiculous, and unnecessary.  It seems that the industrial revolution with its assembly line mentality took away the spirit of craftsmanship.  I remember hearing my aunt, who worked for some years in a textile mill, saying that she sewed the same seam in garment after garment, never seeing the finished product.  When she could sew that seam quickly enough to produce beyond the minimum daily quota and began to earn more money for each piece, she was moved to a new seam on a different machine.  It was not only boring, but there was no way to get ahead.  So many of our ‘advances’ have taken away our connection to creative spirit.

         I believe there is a way to bring soul back into the workplace, but one has to transport it there within oneself.  In other words, one has to hold that work as prayer, as blessing, as the product of one’s hands and heart regardless of what the work is.  Having reverence for what we do as work puts life back into it, and imbues it with heart-energy, reclaims it as our gift to the world.  It also helps us to feel gratitude.

                          In all things give thanks,

                          Jane