There is much you learn in the cold. I refer to a real cold, the kind where your snot freezes around your nose and a gust of wind penetrates like a knife to your core. Your feet turn numb in your boots. That kind of cold, the quantitative descriptions of 20 below Fahrenheit simply don’t do it justice. Even my coworkers remarked that incremental decreases in temperature at that range seemed to feel much different compared to similar increments around room temperature.  The beauty of winter is also undeniable. A forest blanketed in white and frost has an ethereal quality that is stands in a marked contrast to the other seasons. The footprints of fauna are easily visible with snowfall speaking to a hidden life teeming behind the stillness of the ice.

Forestry is technically within the agricultural field and I labored in it for a year and a half in which fell on a particularly harsh winter in the already frigid midwest. It was a first job out of college that I applied for on a whim. In the midst of economic downturn the illusions planted by the university system quickly evaporated in a miasma of exhaust, sawdust, and the sound of crashing trees. The reality that confronted me left me dazed. My naivete left me in the midst of the wilderness with a chainsaw making $10 an hour. The winter season was dedicated to timber stand improvement. This amounted to being more or less weeding the forest, felling trees that were not profitable for logging or that did not provide food for wildlife allowing for the forest floor to be opened to sunlight and neighboring crop trees that also produce nuts less competition. The work was back breaking. Steep draws and spurs would leave you out of breath once you reached the top despite a walking pace. Holding a vibrating chainsaw for hours would leave my hands so stiff the next morning at times I could not physically close them until I ran them under warm water.

I would do it all over in a heartbeat.

At another job, years later, with a swine consulting firm I was suddenly thrust from the world of my inspections, environmental, and compliance work to helping a farm with a critical shortage of personnel. This played out with me power washing pig birthing stalls and various hallways for about 90 hours a week. Oh, I also had a salaried position. The confinement was continually damp. Rats would peek out occasionally despite the herculean efforts at pest control. I developed a rash around my ankles and wrists, perhaps from the moisture. Occasionally I would kick up lime from a storage area that would leave me with a lightheadedness that is impossible to describe. This situation basically broke me. All the lofty prayers of transcendence, knowledge, and devotion were tossed aside with a single thought: “Lord, get me out of this and I’ll be your go to guy!”. My prayer was shortly answered when my position was eliminated from the company a week later. The irony was not lost.

It is difficult to speak of the dignity of work in a modern age. The economy is largely a shell game and smoke and mirrors to keep the churn of fiat currency flowing through its varied unholy channels. In the modern era of political correctness, so many workplaces demand tacit approval or some form of obsequious assent to the ideology of the day. In a modern age why speak of humility? We modern slaves are humbled every day by the writhing leviathan with its millions of eyes on us.

The act of labor, especially physical labor, confronts one with the strictures of the horizontal and worldly influences that demand their due. Esoteric knowledge and arcane tomes suddenly take a secondary role to two cycle fuel and pressure washers. The demands of life initially seem to take away from the ability to raise consciousness to noetic realms. But rather the Benedictines  speak of it as a safeguard from the inflation of pride. I was uncertain at first, from my perspective I personally never felt inclinations of pride or egotism at least on the surface. Rather I felt its opposite a black cloud of self-doubt invalidating every step I would take. But CG Jung also mentions the pairing of whats called negative and positive inflation:

“In spite of their contrariety, both forms are identical, because unconscious compensatory inferiority tallies with conscious megalomania, and unconscious megalomania with conscious inferiority (you never get one without the other.” Introduction to a science of mythology

Peering through an old journal when I was involved in occultist work in my intemperate youth left me cringing at some of the things I said. Part of it due to youth and parts due to some of the arrogance that would slip up in the creative manic moments. Perhaps it took years of labor to suppress a latent megalomania hiding in some recess that threatened to sweep my personality. Beneath a conscious inflated inferiority complex was hiding a positive inflation from my brushes with the transcendent.

Along with some reflection I came to a better understanding of worship. Worship demands a setting of priorities. I noticed that at times I made higher realities a side note or an add on to the horizontal dimension rather than its reference. This orientation is of course exactly backwards and quasi blasphemous. Ideally, the  alignment of consciousness to a dedication to higher states paired with the ever present curse of Adam creates a balance and room for growth. One that requires a true presence of mind and spirit to truly actualize.  I am reminded of the Romans and Spartans who would only fight with a benevolent omen. A matter of prioritizing the transcendent, even in the muck of combat.

It took years for the lessons of those work moments to come to fruition with hindsight as well as insight being at times a fickle thing. Now the cold brings a strangely warm nostalgia to a time my ego was dragged kicking and screaming to some distant hyperborean memory.