Sisyphus to Sand Mandala

Following our sojourn in the woods, we were exhausted. Our next two days were to be our only days off for the next two weeks. We spent them turning a kindergarten into a man cave replete with hatchets, racks of antlers, and a full caribou bust that we affectionately named Miranda after a girl we’d briefly met on our way up to the Powderhorns. A few of us got a chance to check out Old Colorado City during Territory Days, a huge festival celebrating Colorado’s pioneer past. We naively lamented our lack of work.

My first experience with day labor was almost exactly two years earlier. The summer before I began graduate school was the first break in my employment history since high school. I had decided to move into Fort Chestnut for the summer, but had no way of supporting myself. I felt like I had hit rock bottom when I went in to Labor Ready at 5am and spent four hours answering questions like “How often do you come to work under the influence of drugs/alcohol?” with the lowest answer being “Sometimes/Never”, but circumstances allowed that I never had to return after that day. I found that when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you’re often thrown a shovel and told to continue digging.

Corey and Brandon had each spent years working construction and so were assigned jobs guiding bike tours down nearby Pike’s Peak. The rest of us were remanded to Labor Finders until our permanent summer jobs began. The woman behind the desk called my name and offered me what she called a “boring job”. I told her that I was willing to do anything. I would soon find out what that meant.

I was assigned to the Fountain Dump. My job was to pick up bits of garbage that had blown off of the top of the trash heap, bag them up, and return the bags to the heap. I was eager to work, but at the same time I was severely humbled. I was performing the type of task you see state prisoners performing on the side of the road with two men whom I would later find to be ex-felons. The younger man, Jimmy, is 28 years old, on parole, and still had a poor attitude about the work we were doing. It seemed to me that his life had stagnated in a place of survival and not much else. Facing this dark possibility is facing some of my greatest fears: failure, desperation, and being alone.

Johnny is a middle-aged Mexican man from Los Angeles. A former truck driver and former state prisoner, Johnny has a wife and daughter that he is willing to do anything to support. He maintained a positive attitude, a strong work ethic, and a good relationship with his employers throughout the entire process. What surprised me was that he almost immediately took me under his wing. I quickly found that picking up trash has many more nuances than I had at first realized. When I became bogged down picking up the thousands of minute shards of garbage, Johnny assured me that most of the trash was insignificant and that I should focus on the more readily noticeable pieces that would cause the dump to fail an inspection.

The most frustrating part of the job was that, on a windy day, the job was basically futile. My second day on the job, a wind storm with 70 mph gusts and 50 mph sustained winds hit the dump. A series of fences were set up to catch the blowing trash and we would often work our way up the hill filling up bag after bag with this arrested debris. One of the few pleasures of the job was to finish a section of fence and look back at the fruit of my labor, a clean section of fence-line. In addition to the massive amounts of dust kicked up by the storm, these small victories were stolen from me. Often, during that day, the wind would not only replace the garbage as soon as I picked it up, but would actually replace it more quickly than I could work and so would more than negate my efforts. At this point, I began to despair that my task was akin to Sisyphus, condemned to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it fall back every time and be forced to begin again. I felt helpless to accomplish anything of value.

Over the next two weeks I would work as a road flagger, trailer gutter, and other menial positions. I valued the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the other guys in the program and also to meet some of the other people who were in a position of working day labor. I met ex-felons, drug addicts, and homeless people and found that each person had a fascinating, unique story. Although most people wouldn’t reciprocate, I would often probe my co-workers with questions about their current lives and how they arrived at this place.

The last week before beginning our permanent jobs, I had the opportunity to work for one of our guides, Jeff Stelzner, in his general contracting business. I was assigned to help a young guy named Toast work on a house flip. I would soon realize that Toast, although similar to me in age, had accumulated much more wisdom than I. He bought me lunch and quickly began opening up to me about his personal story along with his hopes and ambitions for the future. What impressed me most was his genuine interest in my life and his outlook on work. Toast explained to me that, in his life, work is worship. He glorifies God with his positive attitude and his attention to quality and detail.

There is a practice among Buddhist monks called sand mandala. Groups of monks will carefully form swirls of sand of every hue and tint into intricate works of art. These sand paintings will sometimes grow as large as a room and consume hundreds of man-hours. Invariably, upon completion, the monks will pour the sand back to the earth, wiping their slate clean. The fact that their work will ultimately be destroyed does not deter the monks from creating beauty and joy. Perhaps all work is the same way.