The Q in my DLQ acronym doesn’t stand for Quaker, though it’s not that far off, either. Instead, it’s from Dedicated Laborious Quest, a concept I constructed from Gary Snyder’s Real Work, or life mission. It usually differs from daily employment or a career. Maybe the middle term should have been “labor-intense” or “labor-filled,” we can discuss the subtleties later.

As poet Donald Hall pointed out in his memoir Life Work, our labor falls into three categories: jobs, which we do to earn money; chores, necessary tasks that pay nothing; and work, which can be energizing. In his own case, he realized that when your work coincides with a job, life’s good. For most of us, work is a money-losing activity. More of his thinking along those lines could be found in the Talking Money category at my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog.

In one draft of what would become my novel Nearly Canaan, DLQ was the core of Jaya or her earlier figure’s life, a blend of yoga spirituality (only at that point it was Sufi), an arts engagement, and the altruism of her career. It also came to reflect Kenzie’s journey in the hippie stories, though not so overtly.

It may even be an expression of an individual’s magnetic center in the esoteric philosophy of P.D. Ouspensky. If I interpret this correctly, you have to have something you do with a sustained passion, such as an art or a sport, something that requires daily practice and discipline. Without that foundation, you cannot advance spiritually. Checking up on that, I’m seeing a whole literature on magnetic center in mechanical physics, making me wonder if it’s applicable to Ouspensky’s metaphor, if at all.

This goal isn’t for everyone. As the Bhagavad Gita says, only one in a thousand – or maybe one in a million – pursues it, and out of that, only one in a thousand – or a million – arrives at the summit.

Whatever it is, the yogis at the ashram, Kenzie and his Buddhist buddies, and Jaya all craved it.

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The practice of writing is a big part of my own DLQ, but for a long time I felt vaguely guilty about the amount of time I devoted to it, as if it was a selfish endeavor when I should have been doing something more productive or even more worthwhile. Only after the prayer workshop at New England Yearly Meeting of Friends that one summer, when I was told that writing was a spiritual gift I needed to nurture, did I feel the permission to type away as needed.

My job at the time had me on a four-day workweek, which gave me a three-day weekend after a double-shift on Saturday. Following a suggestion from the workshop, I dedicated one day a week, usually Tuesday, to my writing and revision efforts.

It didn’t seem like that much, frankly, but looking back, I now see that added up to ten weeks a year, plus another two or so of my vacations. For perspective, consider how many people manage to draft a full novel in the month of November as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge.

For me, that time was allocated among fiction, poetry, and nonfiction projects – one of them resulted what became the Talking Money series at the Chicken Farmer blog after a book publisher backed away when a potential coauthor with financial counseling creds failed to mesh into the proposal. Submissions and queries also occupied some of that time.

~*~

It was also time taken away from other parts of my life: from my spouse or significant other, family, travel, hiking or camping, physical exercise, service on city council or a school board, friendships. Even reading got slighted.

From another perspective, I could have devoted it to an overtime shift every week, at time-and-a-half pay, which would have more than covered the mortgage.

~*~

What becomes apparent to me in these reflections is that the DLQ was essential for my sanity. My moves across the country and, for a while, up the management ladder, kept uprooting me, leaving much uncompleted in each place or, at a gut level, undigested. Writing was not only a means of recording highlights and depths before I lost them but also of releasing and letting go of self-imposed obligations to my past, freeing me to more openly face the present.