As the sunlight rapidly fades from the evening skies, the darkening night has brought cooler temperatures and morning fog to our area. After the long, hot summer, people have been outside more, enjoying the cooler temperatures and seeing first hand the beauty of the Earth around us. Several people have remarked to me that fall is their favorite time of year because of the cool weather and the beautiful colors of changing leaves.

On walks with her granddaughter, my wife has gathered an abundance of wildflowers growing along the road near my stepdaughter’s home. Bringing the colorful flowers back “for Mama”, my wife and our granddaughter have brought in fall flowers of bright yellow Goldenrod, pale blue Asters, tiny white wild Daises and black and yellow Black-eyed Susan. As the dying light fades from the sky, the Earth still celebrates the beauty of the re-creation of life.

Our food club, adjusting to the heavy competition for local food, was able to complete the second half of the season with a number of successful auctions. Corn, potatoes, melons, cucumbers, green peppers, onions, and many other items were bought at near wholesale prices and split out to our members. While the outside world struggles with pandemic, conflict, and hatred when humanity faces a common foe, our family and community have continued in the deep joys of the essential work of life.

Relatively untouched by the hardships of the outer human world, our privileged skin, economic good fortune, the safety of our small, diverse community, the abundance of the Earth around us and the strength and joys of our family has made the cataclysms our the outer world more poignant, more senseless and eternally distant from our heavenly moments. While we have watched hatred rise higher and higher, the simple joys of our close-knit family and the abundance of the Earth have made us deeply appreciative of all that we have been so mysteriously given.

It is the nature of the essential work of life, of raising children and surrounding the caretakers with a community supporting them, that there is a joy in every day and a profound gratitude and wonder for the miracle of the re-creation of life. Everyday tasks of making food, choosing clothes for the baby to wear, walking with the young life, and reading stories become a string of blissful moments, united by growing feeling of love for the circle around the newborn. The essential tasks of raising a family and providing community support around are deeply joyful work, a gift for all.

A week after Labor Day, we made our annual trek to the orchard where we gather Concord grapes for wine. To my surprise—though perhaps I should not have been—the orchard had been picked nearly clean of Concord grapes. Many people, worried for the winter of pandemic and conflict, had come to the orchard as never before and taken the gifts of luscious grapes to provide for them in the worrying future.

The owner, a kind, generous man whose father had begun the orchard over seventy years ago, treated us to a ride in the woods he and his wife are preserving, showing us several ancient trees. The man, kind, simple, happy and contented, munched on a poorly formed apple damaged in the spring by frost, and discussed with awe and wonder that “a million lives are centered on each of these trees.”

Raised by his parents on the orchard, raising his children on the same orchard, and providing the community with abundance and joy in the re-creation of life, the man’s essential life work gave him a profound happiness that cannot be bought at any price. After we left, I told my wife, “He’s trying to preserve the woods, so he could be a Democrat, but he’s a small businessman in a rural community, so he could be a Republican, but either way his work is the work of life.”

At my previous worksite, I worked with a couple of violent men-money-chasers who sought to contribute to their community and thought of themselves as family men. They attended church, did volunteer work, and sought to be good fathers to their children. In that way, they were doing the work of life, but they did not have the deep, contented joy of the orchard owner. Despite their work for their community and their family, these angry men were actively hostile and hateful towards outsiders and those they saw as inferior. Rather than experiencing the profound love of life that the work of family and community has brought us, they are bitter and mean-spirited.

The third axiom of The Essential is The community must live in lasting harmony with other communities. By working for their families and their church communities but hating outsiders, these bitter men destroy true happiness in two ways. First, they spread hatred out from their lives, harming and damaging the lives of those who wish for happiness but suffer hatred of being “the other.” Their hatred of others, not only damaging the happiness and strength of other communities, returns to them and their communities, resulting the generations of traditional hatreds still being played out in the larger human world. Also, through natural justice, their hatred destroys their own true happiness, tamping out their joy of life and filling it with bitter remorse. For all their family and community efforts, they do not experience true happiness. While they attempt to find solace in material gains and short-term accomplishments, these are hollow and valueless attainments. They reap the bitter harvest they sow.

In the declining light, spiders weave their fall webs and my wife creates beauty from natural wreaths and dried flowers from past joys. Even in death, the joys and beauty of life are evident. As natural justice moves forward, slowly, inevitably overcoming the machinations of power-over-others, many worry that “justice will not be served.”

It is true that the arc of justice is slow, proceeding through generations. Regardless of today and tomorrow, the hatred sent out by those with power-over-others will, eventually, bring ruin to those same bitter rulers. The Essential Earthly river of life will continue, sweeping away those living out of harmony with the essential axioms of life. Meanwhile, doing the joyous work of life without hatred for others opens the soul to profound heavenly moments on Earth. As wise people of color have said, “Hate is too great a burden to bear.”