I Don't Dream of Labor, But I Do Dream of Vocation

Mary Oliver May: On meaningful work and the joy and work of creativity

Dear Reader,

Imagine a life that looks like this:

In the morning, you wake up amidst a flurry of white linen sheets in a steel frame bed. The sun has just begun to rise over the beach a few steps from your small home you share with the love of your life. You pull on the long t shirt, shawl, and rumpled cargo pants, and put a notebook, a pencil, and an orange into a small bag. You head out into the forrest, and spend the long morning hours listening to and attending to the beauty of Cape Cod around you. You wait and there it is! a poem strikes you mid-fancy, and you write it down. Then, you get home hungry and alert, and find your lover in the kitchen, a mid-morning breakfast of eggs and raspberry jam already set out for you.

This is the stuff of cottagecore fantasy, and for good reason. Certainly, this is a vignette filled with simple and luxurious delights, most focused on the ability to live somewhere beautiful and have the time to slow down.

This is one image of the life and mind of Mary Oliver. It is difficult to look at this idyllic picture and not to slot her lifestyle into some more intellectual version of the New England aesthetic and yoga-going influencer.

It is difficult to not dismiss her as unaware of the world and therefore supremely less useful, such as we might when we learn that Thoreau had his laundry and food delivered to him by his mother while roughing it alone at Walden.

But a whimsical slice of someone’s life is just that—a single still of an entire, moving picture. When you hear actual Mary Oliver speak, she maintains her whimsy, but what you’ll also notice is her devotion to discipline, to showing up, and to her work.

In a world ruled by capitalism and refrains on the superior value of discipline and productivity as the main chorus, it has been necessary for a rebellion to insist upon other values. From this, the ideas of Marx up until today’s internet video essays resound a message of decentering work. This is a message we need, especially in a world of unfair wages, exploitation globally, and replacement of human workers with AI. Yet, a message unexamined just becomes another pole for us to swing between, and some of the messages around labor have swung far enough now to discourage us from the idea of meaningful, vocational work. To explore this more, let’s look at today’s poem by Mary:

I Go Down To The Shore

“I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”

In the recent loss of Pope Francis, I’ve been thinking more on his teachings, as someone who studied Catholic theology in college (alongside being pre-med). One of his views on the complexity of human dignity was that meaningful work was part of the larger purpose of human life. There is a belief that work that is creative, utilizes our attention and intelligence, and benefits those around us and ourselves is something of a sacred thing. In modern Catholicism, vocation often means marriage, priesthood, or a type of religious life. In the broader history of the world, though, vocation can be a vow of devotion to a calling of how to be in the world, and one way we act out that vocation is through our work.

When you listen or read to Mary Oliver talk about the process of her poetry, there is a joy, a delight in getting to have this be her job, as well as a sort of strict discipline around showing up, attending to, and crafting her art each day. In today’s poem, we see her admiration for the simple automaticity in the sea’s recognition of its ability to flow and simply do what it is set here to do. There is an admiration in her tone here and in other’s of her writing for having a sense of humor—even in the pursuit of sacred art—in just getting on with it. This co-exists with the seriousness she takes in this pursuit of poetry with her life.

I’m glad more voices exist to question the all-consuming, productivity-or-nothing mindset that has been so common, especially in the US. What I fear is that we’ve gone to the point where we are dismissing the idea that meaningful work exists, and that this forgetting distances us from the reminder that we belong to and with one another. In my work writing online and being a psychiatry resident offline, I view my work as a deeply sacred and enlivening thing. I want that for everyone, and I know we don’t live in a world where that is accessible for many. I don’t think we make the world better by totally forgetting that this option exists, and could be what we are made for. Said another way, if we go to the opposite extreme, we lose the ability to coherently fight for fulfilling, love-filled work.

Today’s Reflection Question:

What are parts of your daily work that strike you as most meaningful? What are the small moments that light you up, even if you think it doesn’t “make sense” that these do? For example, when I write a really organized and clear note, for some reason hitting sign gives me a little burst of joy. I feel like I’m helping create an organized story for my patient (and to make sure insurance will reimburse them correctly). What stories about work are validating, and help you step away from hustle culture? Can we hold both?

Today’s Activity:

On today’s nature walk, see if you might find an example like Oliver did in the simplicity of the waves simply doing the work they were meant to do. Perhaps it is a bird singing, a flower waving in the wind, a child walking and playing in the park. See if you can notice this as work, too, and what makes it both more vivid and more peaceful than your current connotation of “work.”

See you tomorrow, friends,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day