Let's go back to "The Mindfulness Diary of a Waldorf Teacher" and find out what the author, Bei Wu, really went through.
She volunteered at a special needs service to help paint rooms. All three of them were painting for the first time, so they exchanged ideas while doing it. Improving painting skills in the real world.
We went to work in the vegetable garden, firstly picking strawberries and tasting them as we went along, and secondly removing the weeds around the fruit trees and separating the tangle grass from the big nettle grass. People treat tangle grass and big nettle grass completely differently. The tanglegrass is burned, while the big nettlegrass is used for compost. It's probably because people think that tangle grass, which has the meaning of winding, is unclean. The grass used for composting is to be recycled and reused to make the earth a cleaner place. (Note: Nettle is pronounced like money. The whole body of the nettle grass can be used as medicine, no matter how much wind and sun, always remain tenacious.)
At the time, after dividing those grasses, the author said she didn't understand why she had to do such a time-consuming labor, and didn't even want to throw away a blade of grass, let alone in England. To me, such a job of sorting grass is no less than removing the inner distractions and treating each blade of grass with deliberation. With each sorting, our hands give a certain amount of energy to the grass. Such energy is helpful in recycling the grass.
Removing weeds, shrubs, and digging up soil for fruit trees and turning out the roots of the surrounding weeds. These tasks are especially important.
Fruit trees need an environment where they can grow, and so do children. When children are young, it is better to keep them away from any news in this world, and let them live in a world of pure beauty, so that they can learn to appreciate goodness and beauty. Goodness and beauty are also two of the three principles that Waldorf education has always believed in.
Working as a housecleaner taught her how to clean the bathrooms and how to clean the rooms quickly and well.
There is a kind of joy inside her when she sees a dirty room cleaned up. At the same time, she realized that as a teacher, for a long time, she had been filling the children with instruction according to her own self-imposed standards, never paying attention to what each child's characteristics were. The pressure of too much school work also creates bad influences on the children. These bad influences are the garbage that teachers create. And as an author may write too much crap that leaves the reader with nothing. This nonsense is the garbage that the writer creates. But not so the janitor, they don't create the crap, they are the cleaners of the crap, not to mention transforming the pure nature of man.
Works as a waitress in a restaurant. She didn't feel aggrieved at all when she saw the customers enjoying the meals she served over to them, but she was a little excited and thrilled because it was the first time she had ever worked in the UK to earn money.
When students were grouped together at school, she chose Vibrant Farming to learn how to engage with the land, how to sow, how to harvest and how to make compost. After working in the fields, she realized that her indecisive and backward-thinking personality had changed, and she began to become much more crisp and decisive. The world itself is a big whole. Our bodies also need sunlight, fresh air, and the elimination of waste gases from our bodies. When you work in the fields, the air is fresher, and accordingly all of you will feel that your mind is suddenly much more open.
When Wu Bei was engaged in so much physical labor, she placed herself completely into the work scene, sweeping the floor when sweeping the floor, cleaning the toilet when brushing the toilet, and working in the vegetable garden when doing farm work. She didn't think ahead, she didn't think - how did I get to where I am today! She was really living in the moment, really connected to life. There is an old Chinese saying: "Soldiers come, water comes, earth covers up". In her book, Wu Bei shows the wisdom of living in the moment and going with the flow.
The true meaning of physical labor is that it connects people to life and to the land.
1. Staying Connected to Life
Sweeping, mopping, cooking, washing dishes, and doing laundry are all part of our lives, and it is only when we take part in these labors and put ourselves into our lives that we will receive the gifts of life - delicious meals, clean clothes, and a clean home. With a comfortable and tidy home, we feel better.
I believe we have all heard of a proverb:
What is a house without sweeping the world.
When you can't clean your own house, where else can you make others think you can do things for the world? The process of cleaning your house is a test of patience and care. If the rooms are cluttered, there is also the need to re-plan what each room and each organizer is for, what to throw away and what to keep - all of which is a huge undertaking. At the same time the large number of items to be thrown away and organized is also a big challenge to our mind and body. Don't underestimate the process of cleaning and organizing your room. There are more and more people on the market, who are building on the house organizing and tidying piece of the puzzle, creating organizing and tidying courses based on their personal experience. What's even better is that they are moving from house organizing to document organizing, with methods for deleting, transferring, and storing.
2. Stay Connected to the Earth
Wu Bei has a line in this book that moved me. She says, "Losing connection with the earth, modern man cannot find home."
It seems to me that human beings are becoming less and less connected to the earth. Big cities are filled with tall buildings, and the rise of square dancing and national fitness in recent years has brought park after park into the middle of reinforced concrete cities. Few plants grow naturally in the parks, mostly species that have been artificially planned and transplanted. If you look closely, you will find some trees with hanging bottles, and when you ask, you will realize that they are delivering nutrients. The barrenness of the land has been left to such artificial interventions.
How did the land become barren? Probably the result of human industrialization, a large number of chemical fertilizers, pesticides in the chemical substances so that the soil has lost its original vitality and vitality. In addition, the increasingly rapid urbanization of the city has made agriculture relatively inefficient, and farmers no longer love their land and put less into it, not to mention bothering to make compost.
The book "The Mindfulness Diary of a Waldorf Teacher" tells how to make compost, an organic fertilizer that provides essential nutrients to the soil, allows plants to grow better, and crucially reduces ecological pollution. Recently, China has begun to implement the classification of garbage. One of the main raw materials for making compost is wet garbage. Our government can consider that the responsibility goes to the community to set up an organic fertilizer working group, which is responsible for producing compost from the wet waste generated by community members. This is very helpful in establishing organic farming.
We all know that the earth is least likely to fail us. As long as we work hard and sow our seeds sometimes, while not forgetting to remove the weeds and take good care of it, then we will always reap the fruits. This is why we honor the earth as Mother Earth. We need Mother Earth to nurture the plants so that we can have enough food to grow and flourish. Sometimes man is greedy and he keeps enclosing land, turning cultivated fields into property, making wildlife into food, displacing plants, endangering animals, and leaving them with no place to live! Mother Earth is holding the world together with her only modicum of strength. We need to be friendly with the earth, the plants, the animals, and the world as a whole, and show friendly behavior, so that human beings can survive in this world.
Conclusion:
Mahatma Gandhi said that the seeker of truth should be humbler than dust.
Dust it never says to you,
Look, it is I who give nutrients to the plants,
so that you human beings have enough to eat.
No, it won't say!
Nor will it say,
O greedy humans, please engage in industrialization that considers the ecology,
and treat us well.
Or else, within a few decades, there will be no way to grow crops in the soil.
You humans will have to starve.
No, he wouldn't say that either!
He would just be silent, keeping his job,
patiently nurturing each seed.
Wait for it, when the time is ripe, to break its shell.
May you, too, find a way to connect with life, with the earth, with the whole world, to live well, to give of yourself, to warm others.