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Categorical Condemnation Is The Hatred Of The Mob. It Makes Cowards Brave. And There Is Nothing More Fearful Than A Religious Mob, A Mob Overflowing With Righteousness – As At The Crucifixion And Before And Since. This Can Happen Only After We Have Made A Categorical Refusal To Kindness: To Heretics, Foreigners, Enemies Or Any Other Group Different From Ourselves.

-Wendell Berry

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Categorical Condemnation Is The

Wendell Berry

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Categorical Condemnation Is The Hatred Of The Mob. It Makes Cowards Brave. And There Is Nothing More Fearful Than A Religious Mob, A Mob Overflowing With Righteousness – As At The Crucifixion And Before And Since. This Can Happen Only After We Have Made A Categorical Refusal To Kindness: To Heretics, Foreigners, Enemies Or Any Other Group Different From Ourselves.

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We Can Say Without Exaggeration That The Present National Ambition Of The United States Is Unemployment. People Live For Quitting Time, For Weekends, For Vacations, And For Retirement; Moreover, This Ambition Seems To Be Classless, As True In The Executive Suites As On The Assembly Lines. One Works Not Because The Work Is Necessary, Valuable, Useful To A Desirable End, Or Because One Loves To Do It, But Only To Be Able To Quit - A Condition That A Saner Time Would Regard As Infernal, A Condemnation.

To Think Better, To Think Like The Best Humans, We Are Probably Going To Have To Learn Again To Judge A Person's Intelligence, Not By The Ability To Recite Facts, But By The Good Order Or Harmoniousness Of His Or Her Surroundings. We Must Suspect That Any Statistical Justification Of Ugliness And Violence Is A Revelation Of Stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, And Community)

I Believe Until Fairly Recently Our Destructions Of Nature Were More Or Less Unwitting -- The By-products, So To Speak, Of Our Ignorance Or Weakness Or Depravity. It Is Our Present Principled And Elaborately Rationalized Rape And Plunder Of The Natural World That Is A New Thing Under The Sun.

Men May Dam It And Say That They Have Made A Lake, But It Will Still Be A River. It Will Keep Its Nature And Bide Its Time, Like A Caged Animal Alert For The Slightest Opening. In Time, It Will Have Its Way; The Dam, Like The Ancient Cliffs, Will Be Carried Away Piecemeal In The Currents.

Perhaps All The Good That Ever Has Come Here Has Come Because People Prayed It Into The World.

True Solitude Is Found In The Wild Places, Where One Is Without Human Obligation. One's Inner Voices Become Audible... In Consequence, One Responds More Clearly To Other Lives.

In This State Of Total Consumerism-which Is To Say A State Of Helpless Dependence On Things And Services And Ideas And Motives That We Have Forgotten How To Provide Ourselves-all Meaningful Contact Between Ourselves And The Earth Is Broken. We Do Not Understand The Earth In Terms Either Of What It Offers Us Or Of What It Requires Of Us, And I Think It Is The Rule That People Inevitably Destroy What They Do Not Understand.

We're Living, It Seems, In The Culmination Of A Long Warfare - Warfare Against Human Beings, Other Creatures And The Earth Itself.

Again I Resume The Long Lesson: How Small A Thing Can Be Pleasing, How Little In This Hard World It Takes To Satisfy The Mind And Bring It To Its Rest.

You Cannot Devalue The Body And Value The Soul Or Value Anything Else.

I Could Die In Peace, I Think, If The World Was Beautiful. To Know It's Being Ruined Is Hard.

If You Start A Conversation With The Assumption That You Are Right Or That You Must Win, Obviously It Is Difficult To Talk.

There Are, It Seems, Two Muses: The Muse Of Inspiration, Who Gives Us Inarticulate Visions And Desires, And The Muse Of Realization, Who Returns Again And Again To Say, 'it Is Yet More Difficult Than You Thought.' It May Be That When We No Longer Know What To Do, We Have Come To Our Real Work And When We No Longer Know Which Way To Go, We Have Begun Our Real Journey.

To Husband Is To Use With Care, To Keep, To Save, To Make Last, To Conserve. Old Usage Tells Us That There Is A Husbandry Also Of The Land, Of The Soil, Of The Domestic Plants And Animals. And So It Appears That Most And Perhaps All Of Industrial Agriculture's Manifest Failures Are The Result Of An Attempt To Make The Land Produce Without Husbandry.

It May Be That When We No Longer Know What To Do, We Have Come To Our Real Work, And That When We No Longer Know Which Way To Go, We Have Begun Our Real Journey.

The Consumer Wants Food To Be As Cheap As Possible. The Producer Wants It To Be As Expensive As Possible. Both Want It To Involve As Little Labor As Possible. And So The Standards Of Cheapness And Convenience, Which Are Irresistibly Simplifying And Therefore Inevitably Exploitive, Have Been Substituted For The Standard Of Health (of Both People And Land), Which Would Enforce Consideration Of Essential Complexities.

To Be Patient In An Emergency Is A Terrible Trial.

People Talk About "job Creation," As If That Had Ever Been The Aim The Industrial Economy. The Aim Was To Replace People With Machines.

Soil Is Not Usually Lost In Slabs Or Heaps Of Magnificent Tonnage. It Is Lost A Little At A Time Over Millions Of Acres By The Careless Acts Of Millions Of People. It Cannot Be Saved By Heroic Feats Of Gigantic Technology, But Only By Millions Of Small Acts And Restraints, Conditioned By Small Fidelities, Skills, And Desires. Soil Loss Is Ultimately A Cultural Problem; It Will Be Corrected Only By Cultural Solutions.

It Is Impossible To Prefigure The Salvation Of The World In The Same Language By Which The World Has Been Dismembered And Defaced.

The Christian Gospel Is A Summons To Peace, Calling For Justice Beyond Anger, Mercy Beyond Justice, Forgiveness Beyond Mercy, Love Beyond Forgiveness.

Nobody Can Discover The World For Somebody Else. Only When We Discover It For Ourselves Does It Become Common Ground And A Common Bond And We Cease To Be Alone.

Under The Pavement The Dirt Is Dreaming Of Grass.

The Care Of The Earth Is Our Most Ancient And Most Worthy, And After All Our Most Pleasing Responsibility. To Cherish What Remains Of It And To Foster Its Renewal Is Our Only Hope.

I'd Rather Rely On Mother Nature's Wisdom Than Man's Cleverness

A Protest Meeting On The Issue Of Environmental Abuse Is Not A Convocation Of Accusers, It Is A Convocation Of The Guilty. The Realization Ought To Clear The Smog Of Self-righteousness That Has Always Conventionally Hovered Over These Occasions, And Let Us See The Work That Is To Be Done.

Action Can Only Be Understood In Relation To Place; Only By Staying In Place Can The Imagination Conceive Or Understand Action In Terms Of Consequence, Of Cause And Effect. The Meaning Of Action In Time Is Inseparable From Its Meaning In Place.

To Define Knowledge As Merely Empirical Is To Limit One's Ability To Know; It Enfeebles One's Ability To Feel And Think.

It Is Therefore Absurd To Approach The Subject Of Health Piecemeal With A Departmentalized Band Of Specialists. A Medical Doctor Uninterested In Nutrition, In Agriculture, In The Wholesomeness Of Mind And Spirit Is As Absurd As A Farmer Who Is Uninterested In Health. Our Fragmentation Of This Subject Cannot Be Our Cure, Because It Is Our Disease. The Body Cannot Be Whole Alone. Persons Cannot Be Whole Alone. It Is Wrong To Think That Bodily Health Is Compatible With Spiritual Confusion Or Cultural Disorder, Or With Polluted Air And Water Or Impoverished Soil.

Let Me Say And Not Mourn: The World Lives In The Death Of Speech And Sings There.

Those Who Say Islam Is A Warlike Religion Must Ask If Christianity Has Been As Well.

An Art That Heals And Protects Its Subject Is A Geography Of Scars.

Sometimes I Knew In All My Mind And Heart Why I Had Done What I Had Done, And I Welcomed The Sacrifice. But There Were Times Too When I Lived In A Desert And Felt No Joy And Saw No Hope And Could Not Remember My Old Feelings. Then I Lived By Faith Alone, Faith Without Hope. What Good Did I Get From It? I Got To Have Love In My Heart.

To Cherish What Remains Of The Earth And To Foster Its Renewal Is Our Only Legitimate Hope Of Survival.

But We Can Do Nothing For The Human Future That We Will Not Do For The Human Present. For The Amelioration Of The Future Condition Of Our Kind We Must Look, Not To The Wealth Or The Genius Of The Coming Generations, But To The Quality Of The Disciplines And Attitudes That We Are Preparing Now For Their Use.

You Have To Be Able To Imagine Lives That Are Not Yours.

Obviously, If Christianity Is Going To Survive As More Than A Respecter And Comforter Of Profitable Inquiries, Then Christians, Regardless Of Their Organizations, Are Going To Have To Interest Themselves In Economy-which Is To Say, In Nature And In Work. They Are Going To Have To Give Workable Answers To Those Who Say We Cannot Live Without This Economy That Is Destroying Us And Our World, Who See The Murder Of Creation As The Only Way Of Life.

I Believe In Thrift As I Believe In Freedom, But I Don't Support The Plutocratic Hostility To Taxation, Regulation, And Protections Of Land, Water, And Air.

This, I Thought, Is What Is Meant By 'thy Will Be Done' In The Lord's Prayer, Which I Had Prayed Time And Again Without Thinking About It. It Means That Your Will And God's Will May Not Be The Same. It Means There's A Good Possibility That You Won't Get What You Pray For. It Means That In Spite Of Your Prayers You Are Going To Suffer.

We Need Better Government, No Doubt About It. But We Also Need Better Minds, Better Friendships, Better Marriages, Better Communities.

A Sustainable Agriculture Does Not Deplete Soils Or People.

All Goes Back To The Earth, And So I Do Not Desire Pride Of Excess Or Power, But The Contentments Made By Men Who Have Had Little: The Fisherman's Silence Receiving The River's Grace, The Gardener's Musing On Rows.

The Hierarchy Of Power Is Not The Same As The Hierarchy Of Value. A Good Human Is Higher Than The Animals On Both Scales; An Evil Human Is High On The Scale Of Power, But At The Very Bottom Of The Scale Of Values.

Corn And Bean People, I'm Afraid, Have Extremely Specialized Minds.

We Don't Know How To Use Energy Or What To Use It For. And We Cannot Restrain Ourselves. Our Time Is Characterized As Much By The Abuse And Waste Of Human Energy As It Is By The Abuse And Waste Of Fossil Fuel Energy.

The World Is Whole Beyond Human Knowing.

Our Model Citizen Is A Sophisticate Who, Before Puberty, Understands How To Produce A Baby, But Who At The Age Of Thirty Will Not Know How To Produce A Potato

My Label Is Just "good Farming", Which Isn't Something You Can Put On A T-shirt.

I Think Of The Old Slavery, And Of The Way The Economy Has Now Improved Upon It. The New Slavery Has Improved Upon The Old By Giving The New Slaves The Illusion That They Are Free. The Economy Does Not Take People's Freedom By Force, Which Would Be Against Its Principles, For It Is Very Humane. It Buys Their Freedom, Pays For It, And Then Persuades Its Money Back Again With Shoddy Goods And The Promise Of Freedom. "buy A Car," It Says, "and Be Free. Buy A Boat And Be Free." Is This Not The Raw Material Of Bad Dreams? Or Is It Maybe The Very Nightmare Itself?

When The Mind's An Empty Room The Clear Days Come.

The Answers To The Human Problems Of Ecology Are To Be Found In Economy. And The Answers To The Problems Of Economy Are To Be Found In Culture And Character. To Fail To See This Is To Go On Dividing The World Falsely Between Guilty Producers And Innocent Consumers.

The River And The Garden Have Been The Foundations Of My Economy Here. Of The Two I Have Liked The River Best. It Is Wonderful To Have The Duty Of Being On The River The First And Last Thing Every Day. I Have Loved It Even In The Rain. Sometimes I Have Loved It Most In The Rain.

People Need To Feed Themselves, Next They Need To Feed Their Own Communities.

The Only Sustainable City - And This, To Me, Is The Indispensable Ideal And Goal - Is A City In Balance With Its Countryside.

The Wild Rose” – By Wendell Berry Sometimes, Hidden From Me In Daily Custom And In Ritual I Live By You Unaware, As If By The Beating Of My Heart. Suddenly You Flare Again In My Sight A Wild Rose At The Edge Of The Thicket Where Yesterday There Was Only Shade And I Am Blessed And Choose Again, That Which I Chose Before.

I Dislike The Thought That Some Animal Has Been Made Miserable To Feed Me. If I Am Going To Eat Meat, I Want It To Be From An Animal That Has Lived A Pleasant, Uncrowded Life Outdoors, On Bountiful Pasture, With Good Water Nearby And Trees For Shade.

One Of The Strongest Of Contemporary Conventions Is That Of Comparing To Thoreau Every Writer Who Has Been As Far Out Of The House As The Mailbox.

We Seem To Know That International Wars Tend Not To Stop With Their Formal "peace Treaties." We Seem Not To Have Thought Enough About The Difference Between The Large Official Events Of Political And Military History And Their Overflow Both Into Recognized Effects And Into The Lives Of Unofficial People Who Suffer Them.

Beauty . . . Cannot Be Interpreted. It Is Not An Empirically Verifiable Fact; It Is Not A Quantity.

Love The Quick Profit, The Annual Raise, Vacation With Pay. Want More Of Everything Ready-made. Be Afraid To Know Your Neighbors And To Die. And You Will Have A Window In Your Head. Not Even Your Future Will Be A Mystery Any More. Your Mind Will Be Punched In A Card And Shut Away In A Little Drawer. When They Want You To Buy Something They Will Call You. When They Want You To Die For Profit They Will Let You Know.

But The Only Possible Guarantee Of The Future Is Responsible Behavior In The Present.

One Cannot Be Aware Both Of The History Of Christian War And Of The Contents Of The Gospels Without Feeling That Something Is Amiss.

Properly Speaking, Global Thinking Is Not Possible... Look At One Of Those Photographs Of Half The Earth Taken From Outer Space, And See If You Recognize Your Neighborhood. The Right Local Questions And Answers Will Be The Right Global Ones. The Amish Question, What Will This Do To Our Community? Tends Toward The Right Answer For The World.

And If We Ask What Are The Cultural Resources That Can Inform And Sustain A Proper Creaturely And Stewardly Awareness Of The Lives In A Farmer's Keeping, I Believe That We Will Find Them Gathered Under The Heading Of Husbandry.

A Proper Education Enables Young People To Put Their Lives In Order, Which Means Knowing What Things Are More Important Than Other Things; It Means Putting First Things First.

There Are Lots Of Bad Things That Can Happen To A Food Economy That's Both Extensive And Centralized. There's No Substitute For Petroleum. To Have A Growth Economy Based On A Declining Fuel Supply Is Bound To Be Stressful.

It Gets Darker And Darker And Darker, And Then Jesus Is Born.

We Conservatives Bemoan The Decline In Values That Has Besieged Our Society. Why Then Should We Not Abhor The Lack Of Morality Involved In Discharging Untested Chemicals Into The Air, Ground, And Water To Alter And Harm, To Whatever Degree, Human Life And Wildlife? As A Conservative, I Do Abhor It.

Without Animals, Something Essential Is Removed From The Minds Of The Farmers.

I Have Always Loved A Window, Especially An Open One.

People Who Blame The Bible For The Modern Destruction Of Nature Have Failed To See Its Delight In The Variety And Individuality Of Creatures And Its Insistence Upon Their Holiness. But That Delight-in, Say, The Final Chapters Of Job Or The 104th Psalm-is Far More Useful To The Cause Of Conservation Than The Undifferentiating Abstractions Of Science... Reverence Gives Standing To Creatures, And To Our Perception Of Them, Just As The Law Gives Standing To A Citizen.

A Man With A Machine And Inadequate Culture Is A Pestilence.

In Losing Stewardship We Lose Fellowship; We Become Outcasts From The Great Neighborhood Of Creation.

The Constructions Of Language, Which Is To Say The Constructions Of Thought, Are Formed Within Experience, Not The Other Way Around.

Some Nights In The Midst Of This Loneliness I Swung Among The Scattered Stars At The End Of The Thin Thread Of Faith Alone.

Creation Is Thus God's Presence In Creatures. The Greek Orthodox Theologian Philip Sherrard Has Written That "creation Is Nothing Less Than The Manifestation Of God's Hidden Being." This Means That We And All Other Creatures Live By A Sanctity That Is Inexpressibly Intimate, For To Every Creature, The Gift Of Life Is A Portion Of The Breath And Spirit Of God. (pg. 308, Christianity And The Survival Of Creation)

A Farmer's Market Is Worth More Than Everything I've Written.

New Grief, When It Came, You Could Feel Filling The Air. It Took Up All The Room There Was. The Place Itself, The Whole Place, Became A Reminder Of The Absence Of The Hurt Or The Dead Or The Missing One. I Don't Believe That Grief Passes Away. It Has Its Time And Place Forever. More Time Is Added To It; It Becomes A Story Within A Story. But Grief And Griever Alike Endure.

Do Unto Those Downstream As You Would Have Those Upstream Do Unto You.

The Incarnate Word Is With Us, Is Still Speaking, Is Present Always, Yet Leaves No Sign But Everything That Is.

The Miraculous Is Not Extraordinary But The Common Mode Of Existence. It Is Our Daily Bread. Whoever Really Has Considered The Lilies Of The Field Or The Birds Of The Air And Pondered The Improbability Of Their Existence In This Warm World Within The Cold And Empty Stellar Distances Will Hardly Balk At The Turning Of Water Into Wine Which Was, After All, A Very Small Miracle. We Forget The Greater And Still Continuing Miracle By Which Water (with Soil And Sunlight) Is Turned Into Grapes.

But In Fact As Knowledge Expands Globally It Is Being Lost Locally. This Is The Paramount Truth Of The Modern History Of Rural Places Everywhere In The World. And It Is The Gravest Problem Of Land Use: Modern Humans Typically Are Using Places Whose Nature They Have Never Known And Whose History They Have Forgotten; Thus Ignorant, They Almost Necessarily Abuse What They Use.

We Cannot Comprehend What Comprehends Us.

An Agrarian Mind Begins With The Love Of Fields And Ramifies In Good Farming, Good Cooking & Good Eating

Invest In The Millennium. Plant Sequoias.

I Believe That The Community - In The Fullest Sense: A Place And All Its Creatures - Is The Smallest Unit Of Health And That To Speak Of The Health Of An Isolated Individual Is A Contradiction In Terms. (pg. 146, Health Is Membership)

The World Is Not Given By Our Fathers But Borrowed From Our Children.

The Question Before Me, Now That I Am Old, Is Not How To Be Dead, Which I Know From Enough Practice, But How To Be Alive, As These Worn Hills Still Tell, And Some Paintings Of Paul Cezanne, And This Mere Singing Wren, Who Thinks He's Alive Forever, This Instant, And May Be.

In Order To Survive, A Plurality Of True Communities Would Require Not Egalitarianism And Tolerance But Knowledge, An Understanding Of The Necessity Of Local Differences, And Respect. Respect, I Think, Always Implies Imagination - The Ability To See One Another, Across Our Inevitable Differences, As Living Souls.

Returning From The Wilderness A Man Becomes A Restorer Of Order, A Preserver. He Sees The Truth, Recognizes His True Heir, Honors His Forbears And His Heritage, And Gives His Blessing To His Successors. He Embodies The Passing Of Human Time, Living And Dying Within The Human Limits Of Grief And Joy.

This Curious Faith Is Predicated On The Notion That We Will Soon Develop Unlimited New Sources Of Energy: Domestic Oil Fields, Shale Oil, Gasified Coal, Nuclear Power, Solar Energy, And So On. This Is Fantastical Because The Basic Cause Of The Energy Crisis Is Not Scarcity: It Is Moral Ignorance And Weakness Of Character. We Don't Know How To Use Energy Or What To Use It For. And We Cannot Restrain Ourselves. Our Time Is Characterized As Much By The Abuse And Waste Of Human Energy As It Is By The Abuse And Waste Of Fossil Fuel Energy.

So It Is That The Life Force May Take Possession Of A Man-- So That In The End He May Be Possessed By Something Greater, No Longer At All Belonging To Himself.

I Take Literally The Statement In The Gospel Of John That God Loves The World. I Believe That The World Was Created And Approved By Love, That It Subsists, Coheres, And Endures By Love, And That, Insofar As It Is Redeemable, It Can Be Redeemed Only By Love. I Believe That Divine Love, Incarnate And Indwelling In The World, Summons The World Always Toward Wholeness, Which Ultimately Is Reconciliation And Atonement With God.

We Must See That It Is Foolish, Sinful And Suicidal To Destroy The Health Of Nature For The Sake Of An Economy That Is Really Not An Economy At All But Merely A Financial System, One That Is Unnatural, Undemocratic, Sacrilegious, And Ephemeral.

But The Sower Going Forth To Sow Sets Foot Into Time To Come, The Seeds Falling On His Own Place. He Has Prepared A Way For His Life To Come To Him, If It Will. Like A Tree, He Has Given Roots To The Earth, And Stands Free.

The Ecological Principle In Agriculture Is To Connect The Genius Of The Place, To Fit The Farming To The Farm.

Prayer Is Like Lying Awake At Night, Afraid, With Your Head Under The Cover, Hearing Only The Beating Of Your Own Heart. It Is Like A Bird That Has Blundered Down The Flue And Is Caught Indoors And Flutters At The Windowpanes. It Is Like Standing A Long Time On A Cold Day, Knocking At A Shut Door.

If A Healthy Soil Is Full Of Death, It Is Also Full Of Life: Worms, Fungi, Microorganisms Of All Kinds ... Given Only The Health Of The Soil, Nothing That Dies Is Dead For Very Long.

Education In The True Sense, Of Course, Is An Enablement To Serve-both The Living Human Community In Its Natural Household Or Neighborhood And The Precious Cultural Possessions That The Living Community Inherits Or Should Inherit.

To Mind Being Disliked By A Woman You Don’t Desire And Are Not Married To Is Yet Another Serious Failure Of Common Sense.

A Person Who Undertakes To Grow A Garden At Home, By Practices That Will Preserve Rather Than Exploit The Economy Of The Soil, Has His Mind Precisely Against What Is Wrong With Us.

If The Devil Doesn't Exist... How Do You Explain That Some People Are A Lot Worse Than They're Smart Enough To Be?

I Go Among Trees And Sit Still. All My Stirring Becomes Quiet Around Me Like Circles On Water. My Tasks Lie In Their Places Where I Left Them, Asleep Like Cattle... Then What I Am Afraid Of Comes. I Live For A While In Its Sight. What I Fear In It Leaves It, And The Fear Of It Leaves Me. It Sings, And I Hear Its Song.

Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer

To Be Sane In A Mad Time Is Bad For The Brain, Worse For The Heart.

We Could Say That The Human Race Is A Great Coauthorship In Which We Are Collaborating With God And Nature In The Making Of Ourselves And One Another. From This There Is No Escape. We May Collaborate Either Well Or Poorly Or We May Refuse To Collaborate, But Even To Refuse To Collaborate Is To Exert An Influence And To Affect The Quality Of The Product. This Is Only A Way Of Saying That By Ourselves We Have No Meaning And No Dignity; By Ourselves We Are Outside The Human Definition, Outside Our Identity.

Eating Is An Agricultural Act.

Laughter Is Immeasurable. Be Joyful

O Thou, Far Off And Here, Whole And Broken, Who In Necessity And In Bounty Wait, Whose Truth Is Light And Dark, Mute Though Spoken, By Thy Wide Grace Show Me Thy Narrow Gate.

We Have Lived Our Lives By The Assumption That What Was Good For Us Would Be Good For The World. We Have Been Wrong. We Must Change Our Lives So That It Will Be Possible To Live By The Contrary Assumption, That What Is Good For The World Will Be Good For Us. And That Requires That We Make The Effort To Know The World And Learn What Is Good For It.

The Old And Honorable Idea Of 'vocation' Is Simply That We Each Are Called, By God, Or By Our Gifts, Or By Our Preference, To A Kind Of Good Work For Which We Are Particularly Fitted.

Ask The Questions That Have No Answers. Invest In The Millenium. Plant Sequoias.

Invest In The Millennium. Plant Sequoias. Say That Your Main Crop Is The Forest That You Did Not Plant, That You Will Not Live To Harvest.

We Must Waste Less. We Must Do More For Ourselves And For Each Other. It Is Either That Or Continue Merely To Think And Talk About Changes That We Are Inviting Catastrophe To Make. The Great Obstacle Is Simply This: The Conviction That We Cannot Change Because We Are Dependant On What Is Wrong. But That Is The Addict's Excuse, And We Know That It Will Not Do.

To Live, We Must Daily Break The Body And Shed The Blood Of Creation. When We Do This Knowingly, Lovingly, Skillfully, Reverently, It Is A Sacrament. When We Do It Ignorantly, Greedily, Clumsily, Destructively, It Is A Desecration. In Such Desecration We Condemn Ourselves To Spiritual And Moral Loneliness, And Others To Want.

Better Than Any Argument Is To Rise At Dawn And Pick Dew-wet Red Berries In A Cup.

It's Impossible To Contemplate The Life Of Soil Very Long Without Seeing Its Analogy To The Life Of The Spirit.

All We Can Do To Prepare Rightly For Tomorrow Is To Do The Right Thing Today.

To Treat Life As Less Than A Miracle Is To Give Up On It.

It Is Better To Buy From A Small, Privately Owned Local Store Than From A Chain Store. It Is Better To Buy A Good Product Than A Bad One. Do Not Buy Anything You Don't Need. Do As Much As You Can For Yourself. If You Cannot Do Something For Yourself, See If You Have A Neighbor Who Can Do It For You. Do Everything You Can To See That Your Money Stays As Long As Possible In The Local Community.

We Live Beyond Words, As Also We Live Beyond Computation And Beyond Theory.

It Is Understood That Nonhuman Creatures Adapt To Their Places Or They Don't Live. And For Some Reason That I Can't Figure Out, Even The Biologists Have Excused Our Own Species From That Obligation. I Think There's Going To Be A Biological Penalty To Be Paid For That Eventually.

When I Rise Up, Let Me Rise Up Joyful Like A Bird. When I Fall, Let Me Fall Without Regret Like A Leaf.

The Most Alarming Sign Of The State Of Our Society Now Is That Our Leaders Have The Courage To Sacrifice The Lives Of Young People In War But Have Not The Courage To Tell Us That We Must Be Less Greedy And Wasteful.

It Is No More Possible To Live In The Future Than It Is To Live In The Past. If Life Is Not Now, It Is Never.

The Wrecking Ball Is Characteristic Of Our Way With Materials. We 'cannot Afford' To Log A Forest Selectively, To Mine Without Destroying Topography, Or To Farm Without Catastrophic Soil Erosion. A Production-oriented Economy Can Indeed Live In This Way, But Only So Long As Production Lasts.

The Chance You Had Is The Life You've Got. You Can Make Complaints About What People, Including You, Make Of Their Lives After They Have Got Them, And About What People Make Of Other People's Lives, ...but You Mustn't Wish For Another Life. You Mustn't Want To Be Somebody Else.

It Was A Country . . . That He And His People Had Known How To Use And Abuse, But Not How To Preserve.

Eating With The Fullest Pleasure - Pleasure, That Is, That Does Not Depend On Ignorance - Is Perhaps The Profoundest Enactment Of Our Connection With The World. In This Pleasure We Experience Our Dependence And Our Gratitude, For We Are Living In A Mystery, From Creatures We Did Not Make And Powers We Cannot Comprehend.

Eaters Must Understand That Eating Takes Place Inescapably In The World, That It Is Inescapably An Agricultural Act, And That How We Eat Determines, To A Considerable Extent, How The World Is Used.

We Learn From Our Gardens To Deal With The Most Urgent Question Of The Time: How Much Is Enough?

Finally From The Crease Of The Ravine I Am Following, There Begins To Come The Trickling And Splashing Of Water. There Is A Great Restfulness In The Sounds These Small Streams Make; They Are Going Down As Fast As They Can, But Their Sound Seem Leisurely And Idle, As If Produced Like Gemstones With The Greatest Patience And Care.

They Will Grow, Deliver, And Cook Your Food For You And (just Like Your Mother) Beg You To Eat It. That They Do Not Yet Offer To Insert It, Pre-chewed, Into Your Mouth Is Only Because They Have Found No Profitable Way To Do So.

The Economy Is Still Substantially That Of The Fur Trade, Still Based On The Same General Kinds Of Commercial Items: Technology, Weapons, Ornaments, Novelties, And Drugs. The One Great Difference Is That By Now The Revolution Has Deprived The Mass Of Consumers Of Any Independent Access To The Staples Of Life: Clothing, Shelter, Food, Even Water. Air Access Remains The Only Necessity That The Average User Can Still Get For Himself, And The Revolution Has Imposed A Heavy Tax On That By Way Of Pollution. Commercial Conquest Is Far More Thorough And Final Than Military Defeat.

You Don't Need To Be Told Some Things. You Can Sometimes Tell More By A Man's Silence And The Set Of His Head Than By What He Says.

People Use Drugs, Legal And Illegal, Because Their Lives Are Intolerably Painful Or Dull. They Hate Their Work And Find No Rest In Their Leisure. They Are Estranged From Their Families And Their Neighbors. It Should Tell Us Something That In Healthy Societies Drug Use Is Celebrative, Convivial, And Occasional, Whereas Among Us It Is Lonely, Shameful, And Addictive. We Need Drugs, Apparently, Because We Have Lost Each Other.

The Earth Is What We All Have In Common.

Condemnation By Category Is The Lowest Form Of Hatred, For It Is Cold-hearted And Abstract, Lacking Even The Courage Of A Personal Hatred.

[all The Ancient Wisdom] Tells Us That Work Is Necessary To Us, As Much A Part Of Our Condition As Mortality; That Good Work Is Our Salvation And Our Joy; That Shoddy Or Dishonest Or Self-serving Work Is Our Curse And Our Doom. We Have Tried To Escape The Sweat And Sorrow Promised In Genesis - Only To Find That, In Order To Do So, We Must Forswear Love And Excellence, Health And Joy. (pg. 44, "the Unsettling Of America")

Our Destruction Of Nature Is Not Just Bad Stewardship, Or Stupid Economics, Or A Betrayal Of Family Responsibility; It Is The Most Horrid Blasphemy. It Is Flinging God's Gifts Into His Face, As If They Were Of No Worth Beyond That Assigned To Them By Our Destruction Of Them.

If Conservationists Will Attempt To Resume Responsibility For Their Need To Eat, They Will Be Led Back Fairly Directly To All Their Previous Concerns For The Welfare Of Nature.

We Can Make Ourselves Whole Only By Accepting Our Partiality, By Living Within Our Limits, By Being Humans Not By Trying To Be Gods.

It Is, Of Course, One Of The Miracles Of Science That The Germs That Used To Be In Our Food Have Been Replaced By Poisons.

Commercial Conquest Is Far More Thorough And Final Than Military Defeat.

Once Plants And Animals Were Raised Together On The Same Farm - Which Therefore Neither Produced Unmanageable Surpluses Of Manure, To Be Wasted And To Pollute The Water Supply, Nor Depended On Such Quantities Of Commercial Fertilizer. The Genius Of American Farm Experts Is Very Well Demonstrated Here: They Can Take A Solution And Divide It Neatly Into Two Problems.

A Teacher's Major Contribution May Pop Out Anonymuosly In The Life Of Some Ex-student's Grandchild.

We Have Neglected The Truth That A Good Farmer Is A Craftsman Of The Highest Order, A Kind Of Artist.

For Any Sin, We All Suffer. That Is Why Our Suffering Is Endless.

We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle... We Have More Than We Can Know. We Know More Than We Can Say.

At Night Make Me One With The Darkness In The Morning Make Me One With The Light.

One Of The Most Important Resources That A Garden Makes Available For Use, Is The Gardener's Own Body. A Garden Gives The Body The Dignity Of Working In Its Own Support. It Is A Way Of Rejoining The Human Race.

I Prayed Like A Man Walking In A Forest At Night, Feeling His Way With His Hands, At Each Step Fearing To Fall Into Pure Bottomlessness Forever. Prayer Is Like Lying Awake At Night, Afraid, With Your Head Under The Cover, Hearing Only The Beating Of Your Own Heart.

As I Age In The World It Will Rise And Spread, And Be For This Place Horizon And Orison, The Voice Of Its Winds. I Have Made Myself A Dream To Dream Of Its Rising, That Has Gentled My Nights. Let Me Desire And Wish Well The Life These Trees May Live When I No Longer Rise In The Mornings To Be Pleased With The Green Of Them Shining, And Their Shadows On The Ground, And The Sound Of The Wind In Them.

The Freedom Of Affluence Opposes And Contradicts The Freedom Of Community Life.

I Am Not Bound For Any Public Place, But For Ground Of My Own Where I Have Planted Vines And Orchard Trees, And In The Heat Of The Day Climbed Up Into The Healing Shadow Of The Woods.

For Want Of A Pilate Of Their Own, Some Christians Would Accept A Constantine Or Whomever Might Be The Current Incarnation Of Caesar.

Eating Is An Agricultural Act. Eating Ends The Annual Drama Of The Food Economy That Begins With Planting And Birth. Most Eaters, However, Are No Longer Aware That This Is True. They Think Of Food As An Agricultural Product, Perhaps, But They Do Not Think Of Themselves As Participants In Agriculture. They Think Of Themselves As 'consumers.'

If, On The Other Hand, Conservationists Are Willing To Insist On Having The Best Food, Produced In The Best Way, As Close To Their Homes As Possible, And If They Are Willing To Learn To Judge The Quality Of Food And Food Production, Then They Are Going To Give Economic Support To An Entirely Different Kind Of Land Use In An Entirely Different Landscape. This Landscape Will Have A Higher Ratio Of Caretakers To Acres, Of Care To Use. It Will Be At Once More Domestic And More Wild Than The Industrial Landscape.

At Home The Great Delight Is To See The Clover And Grass Now Growing On Places That Were Bare When We Came. These Small Healings Of The Ground Are My Model Accomplishment-everything Else I Do Must Aspire To That. While I Was At That Work The World Gained With Every Move I Made, And I Harmed Nothing.

I Took Her Into Bed With Me And Propped Myself Up With Pillows Against The Headboard To Let Her Nurse. As She Nursed And The Milk Came, She Began A Little Low Contented Sort Of Singing. I Would Feel Milk And Love Flowing From Me To Her As Once It Had Flowed To Me. It Emptied Me. As The Baby Fed, I Seemed Slowly To Grow Empty Of Myself, As If In The Presence Of That Long Flow Of Love Even Grief Could Not Stand.

The Uplands Of My Home Country In North Central Kentucky Are Sloping And Easily Eroded, Dependent For Safekeeping Upon Year-round Cover Of Perennial Plants.

You Can't Be A Critic By Simply Being A Griper. One Has Also To Search Out The Examples Of Good Work.

No Wonder So Many Sermons Are Devoted Exclusively To "spiritual" Subjects. If One Is Living By The Tithes Of History's Most Destructive Economy, Then The Disembodiment Of The Soul Becomes The Chief Of Worldly Conveniences.

The Two Great Aims Of Industrialism — Replacement Of People By Technology And Concentration Of Wealth Into The Hands Of A Small Plutocracy — Seem Close To Fulfillment.

The Shoddy Work Of Despair, The Pointless Work Of Pride, Equally Betray Creation. They Are Wastes Of Life.

We Are Going To Have To Gather Up The Fragments Of Knowledge And Responsibilities That Have Been Turned Over To Governments, Corporations, And Specialists, And Put Those Fragments Back Together Again In Our Own Minds And In Our Families And Household And Neighborhoods.

There Is No Sense And No Sanity In Objecting To The Desecration Of The Flag While Tolerating And Justifying And Encouraging As A Daily Business The Desecration Of The Country For Which It Stands.

There Comes . . . A Longing Never To Travel Again Except On Foot.

It Is Easy For Me To Imagine That The Next Great Division Of The World Will Be Between People Who Wish To Live As Creatures And People Who Wish To Live As Machines.

We Are Now, Measurably, Reducing The Availability Of These Life-supporting Goods Which We Can Think Of (though Only On The Conditions Of Good Health And Good Care) As Self-renewing Or "sustainable." We Are Also Destroying Rapidly The Supplies Of The Fossil Fuels, Which Are Limited And Not Renewable, And On Which We Have Become Totally Dependent.

A Person Who Undertakes To Grow A Garden At Home, By Practices That Will Preserve Rather Than Exploit The Economy Of The Soil, Has His Mind Precisely Against What Is Wrong With Us... What I Am Saying Is That If We Apply Our Minds Directly And Competently To The Needs Of The Earth, Then We Will Have Begun To Make Fundamental And Necessary Changes In Our Minds. We Will Begin To Understand And To Mistrust And To Change Our Wasteful Economy, Which Markets Not Just The Produce Of Earth, But Also The Earth's Ability To Produce.

If You Establish, Or Reestablish, Local Economies On The Right Scale And With The Right Standard, Then Politics Would Come Right As A Matter Of Course. I Don't Know What You'd Call The Result - Probably Not Capitalism Or Socialism.

It Is The Man Who Can Think Of No Alternative To His Enslavement Who Is Truly A Slave.

Like The Water Of A Deep Stream, Love Is Always Too Much. We Did Not Make It. Though We Drink Till We Burst, We Cannot Have It All, Or Want It All. In Its Abundance It Survives Our Thirst. In The Evening We Come Down To The Shore To Drink Our Fill, And Sleep, While It Flows Through The Regions Of The Dark. It Does Not Hold Us, Except We Keep Returning To Its Rich Waters Thirsty. We Enter, Willing To Die, Into The Commonwealth Of Its Joy.

Be Joyful Because It Is Humanly Possible.

It Is Possible, I Think, To Say That... A Christian Agriculture [is] Formed Upon The Understanding That It Is Sinful For People To Misuse Or Destroy What They Did Not Make. The Creation Is A Unique, Irreplaceable Gift, Therefore To Be Used With Humility, Respect, And Skill.

Community, Then, Is An Indispensable Term In Any Discussion Of The Connection Between People And Land. A Healthy Community Is A Form That Includes All The Local Things That Are Connected By The Larger, Ultimately Mysterious Form Of The Creation. In Speaking Of Community, Then, We Are Speaking Of A Complex Connection Not Only Among Human Beings Or Between Humans And Their Homeland But Also Between Human Economy And Nature, Between Forest Or Prairie And Field Or Orchard, And Between Troublesome Creatures And Pleasant Ones. All Neighbors Are Included.

I Go Among Trees And Sit Still. All My Stirring Becomes Quiet Around Me Like Circles On Water.

Professional Standards, The Standards Of Ambition And Selfishness, Are Always Sliding Downward Toward Expense, Ostentation, And Mediocrity. They Tend Always To Narrow The Ground Of Judgment. But Amateur Standards, The Standards Of Love, Are Always Straining Upward Toward The Humble And The Best. They Enlarge The Ground Of Judgment. The Context Of Love Is The World.

I’ve Been Thinking About That Question About What City People Can Do. The Main Thing Is To Realize That Country People Can’t Invent A Better Agriculture By Ourselves. Industrial Agriculture Wasn’t Invented By Us, And We Can’t Uninvent It. We’ll Need Some Help With That.

What Would Be The Point Of Being Personally Whole In A Dismembered Society, Or Personally Healthy In A Land Scalped, Eroded And Poisoned, Or Personally Free In A World Entirely Controlled By The Government Or Enlightened By Television?

Charity Even For One Person Does Not Make Sense Except In Terms Of An Effort To Love All Creation In Response To The Creator's Love For It.

When Humans Act Like Animals, They Become The Most Dangerous Of Animals To Themselves And Other Humans, And This Is Because Of Another Critical Difference Between Humans And Animals: Whereas Animals Are Usually Restrained By The Limits Of Physical Appetites, Humans Have Mental Appetites That Can Be Far More Gross And Capacious Than Physical Ones. Only Humans Squander And Hoard, Murder And Pillage Because Of Notions.

It's Kind Of Alarming For Me To Realize That, When I'm Writing Stories About Times I Remember, It's Already Historical Fiction.

So Friends, Every Day Do Something That Won't Compute.

The Problems Are Our Lives. In The "developed" Countries, At Least, The Large Problems Occur Because All Of Us Are Living Either Partly Wrong Or Almost Entirely Wrong. It Was Not Just The Greed Of Corporate Shareholders And The Hubris Of Corporate Executives That Put The Fate Of Prince William Sound Into One Ship; It Was Also Our Demand That Energy Be Cheap And Plentiful.

You Can't Know Where Life Will Take You, But You Can Commit To A Direction

Reverence Makes It Possible To Be Whole, Though Ignorant. It Is The Wholeness Of Understanding.

So, Friends, Every Day Do Something That Won't Compute...give Your Approval To All You Cannot Understand...ask The Questions That Have No Answers. Put Your Faith In Two Inches Of Humus That Will Build Under The Trees Every Thousand Years...laugh. Be Joyful Though You Have Considered All The Facts....practice Resurrection.

If They Had Only Themselves To Consider, Lovers Would Not Need To Marry, But They Must Think Of Others And Of Other Things. They Say Their Vows To The Community As Much As To One Another, And The Community Gathers Around Them To Hear And To Wish Them Well, On Their Behalf And Its Own. It Gathers Around Them Because It Understands How Necessary, How Joyful, And How Fearful This Joining Is. These Lovers, Pledging Themselves To One Another "until Death," Are Giving Themselves Away, And They Are Joined By This As No Law Or Contract Could Join Them.

How Do We Submit? By Not Being Radical Enough. Or By Not Being Thorough Enough, Which Is The Same Thing.

Odd As I Am Sure It Will Appear To Some, I Can Think Of No Better Form Of Personal Involvement In The Cure Of The Environment Than That Of Gardening. A Person Who Is Growing A Garden, If He Is Growing It Organically, Is Improving A Piece Of The World. He Is Producing Something To Eat, Which Makes Him Somewhat Independent Of The Grocery Business, But He Is Also Enlarging, For Himself, The Meaning Of Food And The Pleasure Of Eating.

It Is Only On The Condition Of Humility And Reverence Before The World That Our Species Will Be Able To Remain In It.

A Good Community Insures Itself By Trust, By Good Faith And Good Will, By Mutual Help. A Good Community, In Other Words, Is A Good Local Economy.

If You Can Read And Have More Imagination Than A Doorknob, What Need Do You Have For A 'movie Version' Of A Novel?

If You Don't Know Where You Are, You Don't Know Who You Are.

It Would Not Do For The Consumer To Know That The Hamburger She Is Eating Came From A Steer Who Spent Much Of His Life Standing Deep In His Own Excrement In A Feedlot, Helping To Pollute The Local Streams. Or That The Calf That Yielded The Veal Cutlet On Her Plate Spent Its Life In A Box In Which It Did Not Have Room To Turn Around.

Geese Appear High Over Us, / Pass, And The Sky Closes. Abandon, / As In Love Or Sleep, Holds Them To Their Way, Clear / In The Ancient Faith: What We Need / Is Here. And We Pray, Not / For New Earth Or Heaven, But To Be / Quiet In Heart, And In Eye, / Clear. What We Need Is Here.

It Is A Horrible Fact That We Can Read In The Daily Paper, Without Interrupting Our Breakfast, Numerical Reckonings Of Death And Destruction That Ought To Break Our Hearts Or Scare Us Out Of Our Wits.

Be Like The Fox Who Makes More Tracks Than Necessary, Some In The Wrong Direction. Practice Resurrection.

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