newsong

I was once strapped for cash and had the privilege to work at a job that was completely menial, completely physical, and amazingly comforting. Sadly it didn't last long, because I ended up having my gallbladder removed that year. But aside from that story, which I blogged about extensively, I learned a little something about process. The job was working in a bindery,  putting together thousands of phonebooks with the help of a very noisy and very interesting machine. I can't remember how it was that I had time to take this photograph on my cell phone, and I have no idea if it was an allowable action, but I felt like I had to capture the majesty and complexity of this machine.

I learned something about process, working there. That though there were dozens of us working together, if the machine went down, the whole machine went down, and if you fed a page in wrong, it might be your fault when the finicky machine went down. I thought of it then as an excellent metaphor for community, but now it's personal to me. I am a complex machine, putting together the pages of my own book, my own story, and anything could go wrong at any time. But if I follow the process, don't try to rush it or skip to the end, I'm going to come out with a book full of imagination and experience and beauty, and that's exactly the story I have always wanted. There's a lot of people writing on my pages, and I like it that way. It's a good book to live in.