I've worked in offices for 25 years now. Increasing with age, the emotion most evoked in me by office work is sadness. I don't know why. It's clean, dry and warm. I've dug ditches and gutted fish, and office work is better. Nonetheless, I often experience an emotion that I previously felt only as a child. I get homesick. I go to work, fire up the computer, and lay out my pen and paper. And I just want to go home. I have realized that as I get older, I am starting to enter into a simpler, more childlike state, in which ambition, accomplishment, competition, "visibility," and reward give way to emotion, being, attention, compassion, and just wanting to do the right thing.

Office work today reminds me of a famous poem:

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

-- Theodore Roethe

Today I had a couple of hours in between meetings. As I sat in the lobby of the building, I saw coworkers walking about, most with gray hair, people who had spent their working lives in obscurity, answering phones, ordering supplies, writing policies, just trying to get by. Older employees walked past me with obvious limps, one on crutches, all used to be young and fit. There were people who were in serious accidents but recovered, and cancer survivors. All of them spent their lives in the bureaucracy, doing what they needed to do to make a living, trying to help out, all of them still pressing forward, still in the saddle.

I like to think that the work of the ordinary person is a sacred calling, just as sacred as priest, saint, or prophet. As some of you may recall, I like to do photography with a cell phone camera. And I wondered if I might be able to take some photos of the office building that, in a small way, would express a sense of the sacredness of ordinary work, as if we were all working in a sacred space, like a church with architecture and and stained glass windows that captured a sense of the divine.

The building itself is very open, with lots of windows, light, and reflections. The following are photos that I took in between meetings, with my cell phone camera.

First, the outside. Here's a bike rack. The organization encourages people to ride bikes to work.

On to the interior: