Community Post: Beyond Subsistence

Editor's Note: This week at The High Calling, we’ve been focusing on transitions in the workplace, home, and community with articles, interviews, and reflections on thriving in transition.

On the Community page, several writers from our diverse network of bloggers offered their unique insights on the topic. Will Ratliff shared three lessons he learned after suffering an unwanted transition. Cindee Re wrote an honest, courageous piece about her son grappling with his chronic illness. Billy Coffey penned a poignant article about work as a man's identity, and what happened when he moved on from a long-held job. Kelli Woodford shared a lyrical meditation on the beautiful messiness of transition, urging us to not rush into new things too quickly.

While it was terribly difficult to choose, the following article was chosen as the "Best Of" the Community voices this week. We pray it encourages you as you deal with your own transitions.

Two summers ago, at the end of our commercial salmon fishing season, our freezer was nearly empty. Though I was ready to leave our remote fish camp island in Alaska to return to my other life, I couldn’t leave without packages of gorgeous crimson flesh for our winter table. Putting up wild meat stores for the year, what we in Alaska call “doing subsistence,” is labor-intensive and not always pleasant, involving days of patience, blood, knife-sharpening, gut-pulling and packaging.

It took three days to put up our fish. We caught 42 red and silver salmon, and then the marathon began. But this year it would be different. As I gutted the fish out in the boat with an aching back, one after another, slicing, ripping out the viscera with bloodied gloves, I worked with intensity--and anticipation. A small seed of joy swelled within me. It was old familiar work on a wild and beautiful island on which I had spent 36 commercial seasons, a place I had both hated (at times) and loved. I had put up fish every year. I was tired of fish. But this year, I was excited.

This year, rather than just mechanically filleting and freezing the year’s worth of meat as I always did, I was making something new. I was making salmon link sausage, which I had seen online, but nowhere else. I had a new sausage “gun.” I had my grinder, hog casings, fresh dill and garlic, everything I needed to create this new food. I was also making spicy salmon burgers, another new venture, and trying out an original glaze for smoked salmon. It was all a grand experiment. My family had grown up on 100 ways of eating salmon, but not these. Not yet these. And they would love it, I knew.

“Subsistence” is defined as “The action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself at a minimum level.” We all want our work to provide more than minimal survival. No matter our occupation--teaching, marketing, farming, fishing, accounting, writing--we get weary with repetitive labor. A fed belly is often not enough to keep us going.

But that week, with my hands deep in salmon, circled with spices and herbs, every hour running to the smoker to glaze the salmon again, and among it all, thinking about a new jam I would make with my extra rhubarb, I learned this again:

When we get up from our chairs and take chances---creating sausage, starting a blog, joining a board, growing a new grain, teaching a new class---when we immerse ourselves in fresh ways into the viscera of our old work, the old is made new again.

Every year we are older, and every year we have done the same work hundreds more days. But every swimming fish and every floor to sweep and every child to raise and every budget to keep presents new possibilities to re-arrange creation, to see the beauty of God shine forth from the places stretched by our daring, our risk and our faith. One new act of discovery and re-creation often feeds another, widening our eyes and opening our hands to a lighter plow.

Creation is not finished, nor are we, ever. When we lay our heads down in this life and begin the next, we will carry on the exploration and culture-making begun here in our simplest and our hardest labors. I have no idea yet what comes after hot salmon sausage, but I know it’s going to be good!

Author bio: Leslie Leyland Fields is a national speaker, an editor at Christianity Today and the author of 9 books, including "Surviving the Island of Grace," "The Spirit of Food," and most recently, "Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers." She lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska where she fishes commercially with her husband and six children.