take off from here

   

bower

.

There is no point in work unless it pre-occupies you as well as occupies you.

When you are only occupied, you are an empty shell.

A man needs to be independent at his work, so that he can put his own self into it.

When a man puts his own self into his work he is living, not merely working. 

When men wove with their hands and their soul’s attention the cloth they wore, they lived themselves forth, like a tree putting out woven leaves and it made them happy, and the woven cloth of their hands came from them living like leaves from the tree of their life and clothed them with living leaves.

And as with cloth, so with all things, houses, shoes, wagons or cups, men used to put them forth sensitively like boughs, leaves, fruits, flowers from their tree of life, and villages, whole cities lived, lived as true bowers of men.

It will be so again, for man will smash all his machines again at last, and for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaf-like cloth, issued from his life and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a bird in a bush and drinking from the cups that have flowered from his own fingers he will cancel again these machines we have got.

—D.H. Lawrence

.

Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. 

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. 

Take off from here. 

And don't be so earnest.

—Seamus Heaney

.