We all have so much to offer...

A large part of my underlying intent with the Men With Heart Project is a belief that we all have so much to offer each other.  It’s is my observation that there is incredible experience and wisdom in all people, and that often exactly what we need in life is right in front of us.  The problem comes when we are too timid to receive the gifts of others, and not confident enough to give the gifts innate within ourselves.  With our current economic situation and setting it is clear that it is of great value to turn to each other for support and direction.  It is not the case that there are only a few individuals with the magic gift of guidance and knowledge, quite the opposite.  We all have so much.

Farmer John

John was about sixty years old when I first met him.  He was from Iowa and he had a wife, I think he had some grown children—though I know very little about him in a biographical sense.  In a very different and wonderful way I do know something very simple and true about him because I spent hundreds of hours working by his side.  We didn’t talk a whole lot and we absolutely didn’t need to.

I met John when I was a 16-year-old kid with not a damn worry in my big thick head.  I played football and partied, had friends and girlfriends, drove a shitty grey T-bird with some big speakers in it.  It was good.  I balanced my time between lifting weights, drinking Mountain Dew, and driving around town pointlessly and endlessly with my buddies—typical pointless Midwest bliss.

In order to finance this rural bliss I worked for John.  When I was in high school he was my boss on two fronts, in the summers during the week I worked for him at a farm run by the local university.  There I worked on a crew with some good friends; we weeded plots of grain and threw millions of dirt chunks at each other.  John treated us well and invited a few of us to work for him personally on his hobby farm, a small hog operation that he built and ran alone.  Shoveling pig shit was his passion.  Ultimately I spent many, many evenings and weekends working for and with him on a little piece of land about a mile from the Red Lake River in northern Minnesota.

Let’s get a look at him.  John was short and wiry and had a slightly contradictory look about him—slack in stance and shuffling in gait, but incredibly firm and purposeful in action.  He had thinning hair and a sagging face, and was stumped at the shoulders from a lifetime of labor.  If I remember right there was a leg that dragged a little behind, the left one I think.  John was a harelip, or if that is incorrect or offensive he talked with a major nasal protrusion, as if his words were formed in the back of his throat but actually emerged from his nostrils.  I admit that I do a pretty amazing impression of him (with all love of course), and it is highly possible that this feature was completely due to his massive oral intake of tobacco.  Every day he would stash huge wads of Copenhagen into his lip while simultaneously sucking down Camels.  Two tins of chew and two packs of cigs a day, no joke—God was I impressed.  He was a diabetic, and his diet consisted of jelly donuts doled out at appropriate intervals.  He would drink Tab and Fresca, and these were always on offer, I’m not sure which one I ended up liking more. 

He drove a large pick-up, when I first worked with him it was an old silver and black Ford, and toward the end of my time with him he bought a big shiny new blue thing that never seemed to quite fit my sense of him.  He drove slowly, one summer he picked me up every morning and we would drive to the farm listening to am radio.  I always enjoyed these rides, cruising at exactly 55 miles an hour, not fearing the work ahead but certainly ok with not rushing toward it any faster than we needed to.

And work we did; real, hard, hand-tool swinging badass labor.  The very first time I went to work for him I arrived with a crew of 3 friends.  We rolled in about 7:30 am, dressed in dirty jeans and t-shirts and work gloves.  Within 2 minutes of getting out of the car we had crowbars, steel rods and chains all slamming away at some large boulders half-buried in the yard.  I’m not exactly sure why it was necessary to get those bastards out of the ground but I do know that it was a hell of a lot of fun.  John worked with us and we all grunted and strained and had a good time.  We broke for lunch and ate and joked around and then the real work began.

On a previous day my buddies had begun a big project of converting an old shed into a space designed for mama pigs to birth and raise their young, and this day they were hanging insulation in order to winterize the structure.  The project needed to be finished by the end of the day, so they got to work and John directed me to go with him to do chores.  Chores…what a great and maligned word that is, huh?  We headed to the barn. 

At John’s farm chores meant two things, feeding the huge bastard pigs and scraping and scooping their shit out of the massive barn.  I got really good at it.  I’ll never forget the sight of it the first afternoon; the floor was covered in a foot-thick layer of straw, slime, and squiggling maggots.  Smelled super good too.  J

We got to work.  That’s what this whole thing is about after all:  work.  I probably had a pretty good work ethic before this fateful day but I sure as shit did afterwards.  We started scraping and scooping at about 1:00 pm, we simply put our heads down and got to it.  Remember now—I was something of a meathead—I lifted weights daily and played football and was generally pretty strong and fit.  I outweighed John by maybe 100 pounds (I was close to 250) and was forty-some years his junior.  A half-hour after we started my arms were burning and I was pouring sweat.  I looked up and my heart sank as I realized we hadn’t even made a dent in the barn.  Vast fields of thick feces stretched as far as the eye could see, alive and wriggling with little white worms.  I took a peek at John out of the corner of my eye and was blown away to see that he was scooping maybe twice as much in each load than I was, and he was outpacing me almost 2-1.  Some deep inner fire kindled at that moment and I dug in—hard. 

The process was simple, we’d use big wide shovels to push enough shit to the front of the barn and then we’d use pitchforks to throw it up into a spreader that was hitched to his truck.  A spreader is an aptly named piece of equipment because it is used to spread things on fields.  When we filled the thing up we’d drive out to the neighbors bean-field and leave a trail of beautiful poop behind us.  Then we’d drive back and do it again.  If my memory is correct it probably took 40 minutes to do a full round; fill-drive-spread, fill-drive-spread, tab-smoke-donut, fill-drive-spread…on and on as only Sisyphus could appreciate.

Just the simple action of busting my ass for 6 hours (it took us 6 hours to clean the barn that day!) would have been an amazing learning experience in itself, but there was more.  Each time we drove back into the farmstead I would gaze into the smaller barn where my friends were hanging insulation, and I might be exaggerating a little bit but I think they literally fucked around alllllll day.  I walked over for a five-minute break and they were having a staple fight.  They looked and seemed like monkeys hanging from wooden ladders, big fat clown grins etched in their faces as I worked harder than I knew was possible.  There was some initial resentment, I own up to that.  It seemed a little out of proportion for just John and I to be shoveling all day and to have these jokers goof off for 10 bucks an hour.  Anyway I got over it really fast because I had no choice, and not long after that the real lesson sunk in. 

I learned a new mode of being that day, and I gained a major step in maturity.  Most people who know me would agree that I am a pretty eager guy.  I simply love to do stuff, and I like to act without much hesitation.  So when I first started shoveling with John I went at it with fervor, I gave it everything I had.  Then when I realized that this would take us all day I settled in to a place inside myself that I hadn’t previously known.  It was quiet and firm and very acutely pointed to the task at hand.  Maybe this was one of my first real meditative moments in my life, or at least the first one I truly recognized.  I made the Sisyphean leap and I smiled at the labor, and the smile was authentic and full of gratitude.  I knew how much I was gaining.

Now I look back on that day, it is so clear to me, and I imagine this gnarled old man looking at me out of the corner of his eye, full of approval and respect.  From that day on I was his go-to guy, the yahoos shooting staples worked for him intermittently but I had a new home.  A real bond was created.

Several years later I found myself leading packs of young men up and over mountains, through deserts, and over lakes and streams.  We carried very heavy loads and the physical effort needed was immense.  So many times in the toughest moments—the last 500 feet of a hill, a portage with a heavy boat—I would think of him and smile and go right back to that quiet happy place.  Then I would look out of the corner of my eye at the young man at my heels learning the same lesson.  At night we’d sit around the fire and sometimes I’d tell the John story and know that something very good was taking place. 

Again I’d like to end this with love and respect—quietly, with my head down and my heart up…