I saw this in the status update of a close friend in a social network site. She is a qualified Counsellor, a pagan, Trained Priestess of Avalon (in Glastonbury).. and has this to say about her volunteer work, the system and the State of things under our current Tory government.
-Mani
“Today, I have been pondering my own attitude to work and having a ‘job’. I am working as a counsellor with the bereaved, the dying and gypsy travellers, dancing in the edge places where not everyone would want to go, climbing into Cerridwen’s Cauldron and sitting with the pain. I love my work, I work hard, and I have trained hard to feel that I can do it well and yet all my work is unpaid (apart from a very few private clients) and I live on very little in order to continue the work that I love and which is so important in a disconnected world. At the same time, three of the six full time paid counsellors in my workplace have been made redundant. This is David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ writ large; where vital work is done by volunteers who then can’t afford to live, are forced to claim benefits or live on the edge of poverty, and are made to feel ‘less’ because of that. The alternative is for only the well off to provide these services and there would be such a loss of beautiful diversity and connection between people if that happened.
The Tories may think that this is a good ‘trick’, getting lots of us to do ‘free’ work, feel awful about ourselves at the same time, and have no energy or will to question what’s going on. But I think that this will backfire because people are beginning to question what work and community and money/abundance actually means. The very thing that is meant to crush us may be what helps us free ourselves from this spell of capitalism and disconnection.
In the meantime, I work as a counsellor and I am proud of it” – JWS
(reproduced with my friend JWS)
QuantumPhoenix 