Work is something we all spend a lot of time doing, whether it's making a living, stopping the spread of pollutants from a toxic incineration plant, changing diapers, sitting up with kids when they're sick, helping them with their homework, repairing rotted sill plates alongside the house, learning and staying current in a job, cooking dinners, planning and attending gatherings, sowing and reaping, milking goats, applying hot tar to roofs, serving hot fries to busy customers, sweeping and cleaning, painting, singing, acting, tending the sick, dreaming the future, and so on. And then there's hugging your friends and families, taking a long, uninterrupted shower or bath, sitting in the woods listening to the wind ripple through the leafy treetops, smelling early morning bread baking from an inner city bakery, attending or creating a moving spiritual service, holding your lover in your arms, laughing, watching the water flow around the rocks in an April snow-melt-swollen stream, feeling your breath sigh from your chest to your belly. Sometimes I think there's only a thin line that separates all these things, and I also know that whenever I write an editorial, it ends up being a lecture to myself, so here goes. This Working issue of the Journal, like so many of the others, contains articles that are so moving and challenging that I wish our subscription base were phenomenally large.

In this issue's interview, Sarah van Gelder, the editor of Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, talks about the changing face of the American workplace, where once upon a time, hard work and loyalty to your employer meant job security and retirement benefits. But now, with down-sizing and the effects of multinational corporations abandoning longtime locations to go overseas to hire inexpensive Third-World labor, security is a thing of the past. It seems that the short term bottom line rules the corporations. But there are countervailing steps that can and are being taken to reverse this trend and to reroute economics back into community to serve local people and real needs, and Sarah lets us know that we are not alone in this work. To prove that point, we ask you to read about the Feuersteins, whose fabric mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts was destroyed by fire in December 1995. Rather than taking the insurance money and running to another, more profitable location, they immediately announced that they were going to rebuild in the same spot and continue to pay their out-of-work employees while the rebuilding process was taking place. Why did they decide to do this, and how did the community and strangers respond? Please read this heart-lifting story.

Reading Kim Domenico's article, Women, Work and Identity totally challenges the cultural paradigm of modern day work and its effect on women and other living things. Kim challenges the concept that women in today's workplace will transform it simply by being there and that they and their children suffer no consequences from their leaving the home. Isn't it dangerous to us as a culture, as a species, for women to leave their children for a life of work without passion, creativity, away from community and the cycles of life? To take Kim seriously is to set your heart's compass and follow it. Then read our collection of women's responses to Kim's article which adds so much richness and perspective through the stories of their lives. And please, to all our readers, whatever your gender, send your comments in for our next issue.

To add to the threat of complacency is an article by Kim's husband, Orin Domenico, Healing Education. What can we do to help our children go through the slow soul journey to right livelihood? This "golden calf" god we call business creates such a pervasive paradigm that it both disappears and surrounds us at the same time. Orin sees our children as shouldering the burden of our lifeless work ethic, our trash consumer culture. This is a call to save our children's souls.

Stepping out of the standard cultural work mode may result in difficult financial straits; should we be ashamed? What is and isn't defined as welfare is a part of Linda Gordon's Writing Off Poor Mothers and Children. Linda goes through the history of how we got to where we are in this emotionally packed concept of welfare, and discusses the radically different feelings our society has about helping single and working mothers support their families versus "aid to dependent corporations." This topic of work winds its way through our other articles, poems and reviews, each with its own rich perspective. On a personal note, when my wife and I moved into our downtown community in Albany, we bought an abandoned house at county auction and rented an apartment just down the block from it. Our daughter was about two and each day after work I would pick up my power saw and walk up the hill to work on our house. My daughter's name for our project was "the working house," because that's where Dad was working. The fact that I was lawyering about fifteen minutes away was obviously not the same for her as being able to toddle up the block and watch me do demolition, build stud walls, hang sheetrock, paint and stand back and admire the change.