When The Blues Descend

"My son, eat honey, because it is good, and the drippings

of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste.

So shall you know skillful and godly Wisdom to be

thus in your life; if you find it, then shall there be 

a future and a reward, and your hope and expectation

shall not be cut off."

Proverbs 24:13-14

Bee on purple clover
Photograph by Paul Friedlund

The whole world was a deep, dark blue,  for I had waked with a grouch that
morning. While blue is without doubt a heavenly color, it is better in skies than
in one's mind; for when the blues descend upon a poor mortal on earth,
life seems far from being worth the living.

I didn't want to help with the chores: I hated to get breakfast; and the prospect
of doing up the morning's work afterward was positively revolting.
Beginning the usual round of duties-under protest-I had great many  thoughts
about work and none of them was complimentary to the habit.
But presently my mind took a wider range and became less personal
as applied to the day just beginning.

First, I remembered the old, old, labor law, "Six days shall thou labor
and do thy work: But on the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God;
in it thou shalt not do any work."

It used to be impressed upon us as most important that we must rest
on the seventh day. This doesn't seem to be necessary any longer.
We may not, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy"
but we'll not forget to stop working. 

With our present attitude toward work, the emphasis should be upon,
"Six days thou shalt labor" and if we stick it out to work the six days,
we will rest on the seventh without any urging.  Given half a chance,
we will take Saturday off also and any other day or part of a day we can
manage to sneak, besides which the length of a work day is shrinking
and shrinking for everyone except farmers, and they are hoping to shorten theirs.

But really the old way was best, for it takes about six days of work to give
the right flavor to a day off.  As I thought of all these things, insensibly,
my ideas about work changed. I remember the times of enforced idleness
when recovering from an illness and how I longed to be busily at work again.

Also I recollected a week of vacation that I once devoted to pleasure during
which I suffered more than the weariness of working while I had none of
its satisfaction.  For there is a great satisfaction in work well done,
the thrill of success in a task accomplished.

Antique Cream Separator

I got the thrill at the moment that my mind reached the  climax.
The separator was washed.  It is a job that I especially dislike, but
while my mind had been busy far afield, my hands had performed their
accustomed task with none of the usual sense of unpleasantness,
showing that, after all, it is not so much the work we do with our
bodies that makes us tired and dissatisfied as the work we do with our minds.

We have been, for so long, thinking of labor as a curse upon man that,
because of our persistently thinking of it as such, it has nearly become so.
There always has been a great deal of misplaced pity for Adam because
of his sentence to hard labor for life when really that was all that saved him
after he was deported from paradise, and it is the only thing that has kept
his descendants as safe and sane even as they are.

There is nothing wrong with God's plan that man should earn his bread
by the sweat of his brow.  The wrong is in our own position only.
In trying to shirk while we "let George do it" we bring upon ourselves
our own punishment; for in the attitude we take toward our work,
we make it a burden instead for the blessing it might be.

Work is like other good things in that it should not be indulged in to
excess, but in a reasonable amount that is of value to one's self and to the world,
as is any honest, well-directed labor, never need descend into drudgery.
It is a tonic and an inspiration and a reward unto itself.

For the sweetness of life lies in usefulness like honey
 deep in the heart of a clover bloom.

"When The Blues Descend"
(August 1920)
An essay by Laura Ingalls Wilder
From the book, "Little House In The Ozarks
A Laura Ingalls Wilder Sampler
By Laura Ingalls Wilder
(1867-1957)
Prolific American writer and pioneer girl
Edited by Stephen W. Hines
Guidepost Edition
(1991)