For the last couple years I’ve contemplated on and off how remarkably my dad pieced together a living for our family. As a self-employed logger he and his brother made it work month after month, year after year. Sometimes they logged another person’s land; other times they bought land and then logged it and sold it. Sometimes they sold logs to sawmills, sometimes they turned trees into firewood, sometimes they made fenceposts and sold them to farmers. His work was a hustle and it supported our family.

Today I was sitting in my Quaker meeting and contemplating this again. I thought also of my mom and how she hustled too. Sometimes she painted, sometimes she wallpapered, sometimes she cleaned summer cabins, and later she worked at the hospital.

My dad’s family and ancestors – also hustlers! When farming in Quebec became unsustainable they moved to Connecticut and worked in the wool mills. Later my grandfather moved to Vermont and took up dairy farming. To supplement the small farming income, he logged in the fall, he sold Christmas trees, he made maple syrup in the spring.

As I contemplated these images my own hustle came into clear focus. How have I gotten by these unemployed months? It seems almost miraculous to me how it keeps working out. First I got a little severance pay. Then I joined medical studies. Then I got three months of unemployment insurance. Lately I’ve been painting and doing personal assistant work. Piecing together this living as I continue looking for “the right job” has been stressful as hell. I can’t afford new clothes or entertainment, but I pay my rent each month. As I considered my hustle, and these ways that I take after my father, my mother, and my ancestors, my body was flooded with warm feelings. I recognized how my parents and grandparents had gifted me the gumption to get by.

And so there I was, sitting in the back of the Quaker meeting, going on this whole journey and being warmed up by it all. And then it hit me! Somehow I had forgotten that a few months back I had said a little prayer. I had asked simply, “Help me to know my ancestors,” and then I had forgotten all about it. Yet with this remembering my skin goosebumped and a knowing came. My prayer, my intention, my desire, however you wish to name it, it was being answered.

Once more I felt the stress throughout my body that I’ve been feeling these past few months. The stress of moneylessness, the stress of unknowing, the stress of the hustle. I thought about how stressed my dad must have been throughout his working life. And how stressed his father must have been. And how stressed any farmer must be. Then I saw an image in my mind of a farmer standing in a field, staring dejectedly at the ground. I could see the farmer was at his lowest moment; the moment when he knew it was all lost. And with this image I came to see that my stress is my ancestors’ stress. That its purpose was to guide me, to teach me how to hustle. It was love, all along, misunderstood. It was ancestral wisdom, misunderstood.

I opened my eyes and came back to the room. Before me sat a couple dozen Friends in silence, each with their eyes closed, each on their own journeys. On the wall yet more Friends were being projected, each in their homes and attending the meeting via Zoom. Observing the projection on the wall I was once again reminded of the poor condition of the wall’s paint. Since meeting in person again the paint’s been bothering me. I keep imagining the positive transformation the space would have from a fresh coat. I had even thought several times that I should approach the Property and Finance Committee to propose that I paint the meetinghouse for a reasonable price. Fear held me back.

Yet when the meeting ended, I thought about something my dad told me a couple years back. He said that sometimes when he drove down the road and came across a good stretch of trees he’d simply pull into the next driveway, knock on the door of a house, and make his pitch to whomever answered that he’d like to log those trees. Guided by what my dad would do, armed with ancestral gumption, I stresslessly approached someone on the Property and Finance Committee and I made my pitch.