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I See That The Life Of This Place Is Always Emerging Beyond Expectation Or Prediction Or Typicality, That It Is Unique, Given To The World Minute By Minute, Only Once, Never To Be Repeated. And This Is When I See That This Life Is A Miracle, Absolutely Worth Having, Absolutely Worth Saving. We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle.

-Wendell Berry

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I See That The

Wendell Berry

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I See That The Life Of This Place Is Always Emerging Beyond Expectation Or Prediction Or Typicality, That It Is Unique, Given To The World Minute By Minute, Only Once, Never To Be Repeated. And This Is When I See That This Life Is A Miracle, Absolutely Worth Having, Absolutely Worth Saving. We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle.

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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.

... It Is Not A Crisis Of Our Environs Or Surroundings; It Is A Crisis Of Our Lives As Individuals, As Family Members, As Community Members, And As Citizens. We Have An 'environmental Crisis' Because We Have Consented To An Economy In Which By Eating, Drinking, Working, Resting, Traveling, And Enjoying Ourselves We Are Destroying The Natural, God-given World.

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.

The Road Is A Word, Conceived Elsewhere And Laid Across The Country In The Wound Prepared For It: A Word Made Concrete And Thrust Among Us.

Invest In The Millenium.

To Be Interested In Food But Not In Food Production Is Clearly Absurd.

Food Production

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

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

How Joyful To Be Together, Alone As When We First Were Joined In Our Little House By The River Long Ago, Except That Now We Know Each Other, As We Did Not Then; And Now Instead Of Two Stories Fumbling To Meet, We Belong To One Story That The Two, Joining, Made. And Now We Touch Each Other With The Tenderness Of Mortals, Who Know Themselves

It Is Only By Understanding The Cultural Complexity And Largeness Of The Concept Of Agriculture That We Can See The Threatening Diminishments Implied By The Term 'agribusiness.'

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 Issue Here Really Is Not Whether International Trade Shall Be Free But Whether Or Not It Makes Any Sense For A Country - Or, For That Matter, A Region - To Destroy Its Own Capacity To Produce Its Own Food. How Can A Government, Entrusted With The Safety And Health Of Its People, Conscientiously Barter Away In The Name Of An Economic Idea That People's Ability To Feed Itself? And If People Lose Their Ability To Feed Themselves, How Can They Be Said To Be Free?

Eating Is An Agricultural Act.

You Can't Live Entirely Alone. You Have To Have Some Kind Of A Support System.

Support Systems

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.

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

When Going Back Makes Sense, You Are Going Ahead.

Physical Health Doesn't Exist Apart From The Health Of Other Things. Health Ultimately Involves The Community, And The Community Ultimately Involves The Place And Natural Life Of That Place, So That Real Health Is Harmony With The World.

For Complex Reasons, Our Culture Allows "economy" To Mean Only "money Economy." It Equates Success And Even Goodness With Monetary Profit Because It Lacks Any Other Standard Of Measurement. I Am No Economist, But I Venture To Suggest That One Of The Laws Of Such An Economy Is That A Farmer Is Worth More Dead Than Alive. A Second Law Is That Anything Diseased Is More Profitable Than Anything That Is Healthy. What Is Wrong With Us Contributes More To The "gross National Product" Than What Is Right With Us.

A Viable Neighborhood Is A Community: And A Viable Community Is Made Up Of Neighbors Who Cherish And Protect What They Have In Common.

The Cloud Is Free Only To Go With The Wind. The Rain Is Free Only In Falling.

I Finally Knew... Why Christ's Prayer In The Garden Could Not Be Granted. He Had Been Seeded And Birthed Into Human Flesh. He Was One Of Us. Once He Had Become Mortal, He Could Not Become Immortal Except By Dying. That He Prayed The Prayer At All Showed How Human He Was. That He Knew It Could Not Be Granted Showed His Divinity; That He Prayed It Anyhow Showed His Mortality, His Mortal Love Of Life That His Death Made Immortal.

The Damages Of Our Present Agriculture All Come From The Determination To Use The Life Of The Soil As If It Were An Extractable Resource Like Coal.

Sabbath Observance Invites Us To Stop. It Invites Us To Rest. It Asks Us To Notice That While We Rest, The World Continues Without Our Help. It Invites Us To Delight In The World's Beauty And Abundance.

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.

I Hear From Readers A Good Deal, And I Try To Answer Every Letter. I Think, Because Of My Commitment To Issues Of Conservation And Good Agriculture And Peaceableness, They Find Something Hopeful In My Work.

I Thought, He Must Forebear To Reveal His Power And Glory By Presenting Himself As Himself, And Must Be Present Only In The Ordinary Miracle Of The Existence Of His Creatures. Those Who Wish To See Him Must See Him In The Poor, The Hungry, The Hurt, The Wordless Creatures, The Groaning And Travailing Beautiful World.

You Cannot Save The Land Apart From The People, Or The People Apart From The Land.

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.

Only By Restoring The Broken Connections Can We Be Healed. Connection Is Health. And What Our Society Does Its Best To Disguise From Us Is How Ordinary, How Commonly Attainable, Health Is. We Lose Our Health -- And Create Profitable Diseases And Dependencies -- By Failing To See The Direct Connections Between Living And Eating, Eating And Working, Working And Loving.

This New War, Like The Previous One, Would Be A Test Of The Power Of Machines Against People And Places; Whatever Its Causes And Justifications, It Would Make The World Worse. This Was True Of That New War, And It Has Been True Of Every New War Since... I Knew Too That This New War Was Not Even New But Was Only The Old One Come Again. And What Caused It? It Was Caused, I Thought, By People Failing To Love One Another, Failing To Love Their Enemies.

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

The Promoters Of The Global Economy...see Nothing Odd Or Difficult About Unlimited Economic Growth Or Unlimited Consumption In A Limited World.

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.

When The Possessions And Households Of Citizens Are No Longer Honored By The Acts, As Well As The Principles, Of Their Government, Then The Concentration Camp Ceases To Be One Of The Possibilities Of Human Nature And Becomes One Of Its Likelihoods.

No Matter How Much One May Love The World As A Whole, One Can Live Fully In It Only By Living Responsibly In Some Small Part Of It. Where We Live And Who We Live There With Define The Terms Of Our Relationship To The World And To Humanity. We Thus Come Again To The Paradox That One Can Become Whole Only By The Responsible Acceptance Of One's Partiality.

This Massive Ascendancy Of Corporate Power Over Democratic Process Is Probably The Most Ominous Development Since The End Of World War Ii, And For The Most Part "the Free World" Seems To Be Regarding It As Merely Normal.

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

To Love Anything Good, At Any Cost, Is A Bargain.

If We Are Looking For Insurance Against Want And Oppression, We Will Find It Only In Our Neighbors' Prosperity And Goodwill And, Beyond That, In The Good Health Of Our Worldly Places, Our Homelands. If We Were Sincerely Looking For A Place Of Safety, For Real Security And Success, Then We Would Begin To Turn To Our Communities - And Not The Communities Simply Of Our Human Neighbors But Also Of The Water, Earth, And Air, The Plants And Animals, All The Creatures With Whom Our Local Life Is Shared. (pg. 59, "racism And The Economy")

I Have This Love For Mattie. It Was Formed In Me As He Himself Was Formed. It Has His Shape, You Might Say. He Fits It. He Fits Into It As He Fits Into His Clothes. He Will Always Fit Into It. When He Gets Out Of The Car And I Meet Him And Hug Him, There He Is, Him Himself, Something Of My Very Own Forever, And My Love For Him Goes All Around Him Just As It Did When He Was A Baby And A Little Boy And A Young Man Grown.

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

The Passive American Consumer, Sitting Down To A Meal Of Pre-prepared Food, Confronts Inert, Anonymous Substances That Have Been Processed, Dyed, Breaded, Sauced, Gravied, Ground, Pulped, Strained, Blended, Prettified, And Sanitized Beyond Resemblance To Any Part Of Any Creature That Ever Lived. The Products Of Nature And Agriculture Have Been Made, To All Appearances, The Products Of Industry. Both Eater And Eaten Are Thus In Exile From Biological Reality.

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.

The Music, While It Lasted, Brought A New World Into Being.

The Life We Want Is Not Merely The One We Have Chosen And Made. It Is The One We Must Be Choosing And Making

It Would Take Me Years Of Reading, Thought, And Experience To Learn Again That In This World Limits Are Not Only Inescapable But Indispensable.

We Must Learn To Acknowledge That The Creation Is Full Of Mystery; We Will Never Entirely Understand It. We Must Abandon Arrogance And Stand In Awe. We Must Recover The Sense Of The Majesty Of Creation, And The Ability To Be Worshipful In Its Presence. For I Do Not Doubt That It Is Only On The Condition Of Humility And Reverence Before The World That Our Species Will Be Able To Remain In It.

The Paramount Doctrine Of The Economic And Technological Euphoria Of Recent Decades Has Been That Everything Depends On Innovation. It Was Understood As Desirable, And Even Necessary, That We Should Go On And On From One Technological Innovation To The Next, Which Would Cause The Economy To "grow" And Make Everything Better And Better. This Of Course Implied At Every Point A Hatred Of The Past, Of All Things Inherited And Free. All Things Superceded In Our Progress Of Innovations, Whatever Their Value Might Have Been, Were Discounted As Of No Value At All.

However Destructive May Be The Policies Of The Government And The Methods And Products Of The Corporations, The Root Of The Problem Is Always Found To Be Found In Private Life. We Must Learn To See That Every Problem That Concerns Us As Conservationists Always Leads Straight To The Question Of How We Live. The World Is Being Destroyed, No Doubt About It, By The Greed Of The Rich And Powerful. It Is Also Being Destroyed By Popular Demand.

What Leads To Peace Is Not Violence But Peaceableness, Which Is Not Passivity, But An Alert, Informed, Practiced, And Active State Of Being.

Love Is Never Abstract. It Does Not Adhere To The Universe Or The Planet Or The Nation Or The Institution Or The Profession, But To The Singular Sparrows Of The Street, The Lilies Of The Field, "to The Least Of These My Brethren." Love Is Not, By Its Own Desire, Heroic. It Is Heroic Only When Compelled To Be. It Exists By Its Willingness To Be Anonymous, Humble, And Unrewarded.

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.

I Dream Of A Quiet Man / Who Explains Nothing And Defends Nothing, But Only Knows / Where The Rarest Wildflowers / Are Blooming, And Who Goes, / And Finds That He Is Smiling / Not By His Own Will.

The Great Enemy Of Freedom Is The Alignment Of Political Power With Wealth. This Alignment Destroys The Commonwealth - That Is, The Natural Wealth Of Localities And The Local Economies Of Household, Neighborhood, And Community - And So Destroys Democracy, Of Which The Commonwealth Is The Foundation And Practical Means.

There Is Much Good Work To Be Done By Every One Of Us And We Must Begin To Do It.

It's Mighty Hard Right Now To Think Of Anything That's Precious That Isn't Endangered. There Are No Sacred And Unsacred Places; There Are Only Sacred And Desecrated Places. My Belief Is That The World And Our Life In It Are Conditional Gifts.

To Be Well Used, Creatures And Places Must Be Used Sympathetically, Just As They Must Be Known Sympathetically To Be Well Known...the "animal Scientist" To Whom It Is Of No Concern Whether Or Not Animals Suffer Will Almost Inevitably Aid And Abet The Destruction Of The Decent Old Ideal Of Animal Husbandry And, As A Consequence, Increase The Suffering Of Animals. I Hope That My Country May Be Delivered From The Remote, Cold Abstractions Of University Science.

...i Was A Young Man. I Hardly Knew What I Knew, Let Alone What I Was Going To Know.

If We Are Serious About Peace, Then We Must Work For It As Ardently, Seriously, Continuously, Carefully, And Bravely As We Have Ever Prepared For War.

History Leaves No Doubt That Among Of The Most Regrettable Crimes Committed By Human Beings Have Been Committed By Those Human Beings Who Thought Of Themselves As Civilized. What, We Must Ask, Does Our Civilization Possess That Is Worth Defending? One Thing Worth Defending, I Suggest, Is The Imperative To Imagine The Lives Of Beings Who Are Not Ourselves And Are Not Like Ourselves: Animals, Plants, Gods, Spirits, People Of Other Countries, Other Races, People Of The Other Sex, Places And Enemies.

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

Good Farmers, Who Take Seriously Their Duties As Stewards Of Creation And Of Their Land's Inheritors, Contribute To The Welfare Of Society In More Ways Than Society Usually Acknowledges, Or Even Knows. These Farmers Produce Valuable Goods, Of Course; But They Also Conserve Soil, They Conserve Water, They Conserve Wildlife, They Conserve Open Space, They Conserve Scenery.

In Living In The World By His Own Will And Skill, The Stupidest Peasant Or Tribesman Is More Competent Than The Most Intelligent Worker Or Technician Or Intellectual In A Society Of Specialists.

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.

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.

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.

Don't Pray For The Rain To Stop; Pray For Good Luck Fishing When The River Floods.

The Presence Of The Present Has Become Insistent, Undeniable, And I Dare Not Look Away.

The Acquisition Of Knowledge Always Involves The Revelation Of Ignorance-almost Is The Revelation Of Ignorance.

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.

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.

It Is Certain, I Think, That The Best Government Is The One That Governs The Least. But There Is A Much-neglected Corollary: The Best Citizen Is The One Who Least Needs Governing.

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

There’s Nothing Under The Ground That’s Worth More Than The Little Layer Of Topsoil Sitting On Top Of It.

From A Human Point Of View, The Difference Between The Mind Of A Human And That Of A Mountain Goat Is Wonderful; From The Point Of View Of The Infinite Ignorance That Surrounds Us, The Difference Is Not Impressive. Indeed, From That Point Of View, The Goat May Have The Better Mind, For He Is More Congenially Adapted To His Place, And He Would Not Endanger His Species Or His Planet For The Sake Of An Idea.

The Soil Is The Great Connector Of Lives, The Source And Destination Of All. It Is The Healer And Restorer And Resurrector, By Which Disease Passes Into Health, Age Into Youth, Death Into Life. Without Proper Care For It We Can Have No Community, Because Without Proper Care For It We Can Have No Life.

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

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.

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.

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.

In The Loss Of Skill, We Lose Stewardship; In Losing Stewardship We Lose Fellowship; We Become Outcasts From The Great Neighborhood Of Creation. It Is Possible - As Our Experience In This Good Land Shows - To Exile Ourselves From Creation, And To Ally Ourselves With The Principle Of Destruction - Which Is, Ultimately, The Principle Of Nonentity. It Is To Be Willing In General For Being To Not-be. And Once We Have Allied Ourselves With That Principle, We Are Foolish To Think That We Can Control The Results. (pg. 303, The Gift Of Good Land)

Individualism Is Going Around These Days In Uniform, Handing Out The Party Line On Individualism.

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.

The World, Which God Looked At And Found Entirely Good, We Find None Too Good To Pollute Entirely And Destroy Piecemeal.

Unexpected Wonders Happen, Not On Schedule, Or When You Expect Or Want Them To Happen, But If You Keep Hanging Around, They Do Happen.

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

What Can't Be Helped Must Be Endured.

The More Artificial A Human Environment Becomes, The More The Word ‘natural’ Becomes A Term Of Value.

Under The Rule Of The "free Market" Ideology, We Have Gone Through Two Decades Of An Energy Crisis Without An Effective Energy Policy. Because Of An Easy And Thoughtless Reliance On Imported Oil, We Have No Adequate Policy For The Conservation Of Gasoline And Other Petroleum Products. We Have No Adequate Policy For The Development Or Use Of Other, Less Harmful Forms Of Energy. We Have No Adequate System Of Public Transportation.

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.

To Hear Of A Thousand Deaths In War Is Terrible, And We 'know' That It Is. But As It Registers On Our Hearts, It Is Not More Terrible Than One Death Fully Imagined.

If I Was Freer Than I Had Ever Been In My Life, I Was Not Yet Entirely Free, For I Still Hung On To An Idea That Had Been Set Deep In Me By All My Schooling So Far: I Was A Bright Boy And I Ought To Make Something Out Of Myself... Something Else That Would Be A Cut Or Two Above My Humble Origins.

We Still (sometimes) Remember That We Cannot Be Free If Our Minds And Voices Are Controlled By Someone Else. But We Have Neglected To Understand That We Cannot Be Free If Our Food And Its Sources Are Controlled By Someone Else. The Condition Of The Passive Consumer Of Food Is Not A Democratic Condition. One Reason To Eat Responsibly Is To Live Free. (pg. 323, The Pleasures Of Eating)

The Mind That Is Not Baffled, Is Unemployed

The Only Time I've Been Arrested Was In Opposing The Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant In Indiana. That Was In 1979.

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.

Under The Pavement The Dirt Is Dreaming Of Grass.

It Is Not From Ourselves That We Learn To Be Better Than We Are.

It May Be That When We No Longer Know... Which Way To Go We Have Begun Our Real Journey. The Mind That Is Not Baffled Is Not Employed. The Impeded Stream Is The One That Sings.

Living Without Expectations Is Hard But, When You Can Do It, Good. Living Without Hope Is Harder, And That Is Bad. You Have Got To Have Hope, And You Must'nt Shirk It. Love, After All, Hopeth All Things. But Maybe You Must Learn, And It Is Hard Learning, Not To Hope Out Loud, Especially For Other People. You Must Not Let Your Hope Turn Into Expectation.

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

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

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 Rule, Acknowledged Or Not, Seems To Be That If We Have Great Power We Must Use It. We Would Use A Steam Shovel To Pick Up A Dime. We Have Experts Who Can Prove There Is No Other Way To Do It.

[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")

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.

You May Say That I Am Just Another Outdated Old Man Complaining About Progress And The Changes Of Time. But, You See, I Have Well Considered That Possibility Myself, And Am Prepared O Submit To Correction By Anybody Who Cares About A Community, Who Can Show Me How The World Is Improved By That Community's Dying.

We Have Made It Our Overriding Ambition To Escape Work, And As A Consequence Have Debased Work Until It Is Only Fit To Escape From. We Have Debased The Products Of Work And Have Been, In Turn, Debased By Them. (pg. 43, "the Unsettling Of America")

The People Who Benefit From This State Of Affairs Have Been At Pains To Convince Us That The Agricultural Practices And Policies That Have Almost Annihilated The Farming Population Have Greatly Benefited The Population Of Food Consumers. But More And More Consumers Are Now Becoming Aware That Our Supposed Abundance Of Cheap And Healthful Food Is To A Considerable Extent Illusory.

Go With Your Love To The Fields. Lie Down In The Shade. Rest Your Head In Her Lap. Swear Allegiance To What Is Nighest Your Thoughts. As Soon As The Generals And The Politicos Can Predict The Motions Of Your Mind, Lose It. Leave It As A Sign To Mark The False Trail, The Way You Didn't Go. Be Like The Fox Who Makes More Tracks Than Necessary, Some In The Wrong Direction. Practice Resurrection.

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.

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.

We Clasp The Hands Of Those Who Go Before Us, And The Hands Of Those Who Come After Us; We Enter The Little Circle Of Each Other's Arms, And The Larger Circle Of Lovers Whose Hands Are Joined In A Dance, And The Larger Circle Of All Creatures, Passing In And Out Of Life, Who Move Also In A Dance, To A Music So Subtle And Vast That No Ear Hears It Except In Fragments.

Only By Restoring The Broken Connections Can We Be Healed. Connection Is Health.

Interdependence

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.

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

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.

No Individual Life Is An End In Itself. One Can Live Fully Only By Participating Fully In The Succession Of The Generations, In Death As Well As In Life. Some Would Say (and I Am One Of Them) That We Can Live Fully Only By Making Ourselves Answerable To The Claims Of Eternity As To Those Of Time.

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.

There Are Endless Ways To Amuse Oneself And Be Idle, And Most Of Them Lie Outside The Woods. I Assume That When A Man Goes To The Woods He Goes Because He Needs To. I Think He Is Drawn To The Wilderness Much As He Is Drawn To A Woman: It Is, In Its Way, His Opposite. It Is As Far As Possible Unlike His Home Or His Work Or Anything He Will Ever Manufacture. For That Reason He Can Take From It A Solace-an Understanding Of Himself, Of What He Needs And What He Can Do Without-such As He Can Find Nowhere Else.

Humans, Like All Other Creatures, Must Make A Difference; Otherwise, They Cannot Live. But Unlike Other Creatures, Humans Must Make A Choice As To The Kind And Scale Of Difference They Make. If They Choose To Make Too Small A Difference, They Diminish Their Humanity. If They Choose To Make Too Great A Difference, They Diminish Nature, And Narrow Their Subsequent Choices; Ultimately, They Diminish Or Destroy Themselves. Nature, Then, Is Not Only Our Source But Also Our Limit And Measure.

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

If Love Could Force My Own Thoughts Over The Edge Of The World And Out Of Time, Then Could I Not See How Even Divine Omnipotence Might By The Force Of Its Own Love Be Swayed Down To The World? ...how It Might, Because It Could Know Its Own Creatures Only By Compassion, Put On Mortal Flesh, Become A Man, And Walk Among Us, Assume Our Nature And Our Fate, Suffer Our Faults And Our Death?

Our Obsession With Security Is A Measure Of The Power We Have Granted The Future To Hold Over Us.

It Surely Is Far Better To Be Disliked By Somebody You Don't Love Than By Somebody You Do. Even So, I Mind. Even So, Failing To Love Somebody Is A Failure.

The Law Is Meant To Work For Justice. But People Who Know Themselves Know That, At Some Point, Justice Had Better Be Mitigated By Mercy. And You Don't Get To Mercy By A Legal Principle. You Get To Mercy By Way Of Imagination, Sympathy, Tenderness Of Heart - Which Are Not Weaknesses.

We Are Far More Concerned About The Desecration Of The Flag Than We Are About The Desecration Of Our Land.

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.

But Our Waste Problem Is Not The Fault Only Of Producers. It Is The Fault Of An Economy That Is Wasteful From Top To Bottom-a Symbiosis Of An Unlimited Greed At The Top And A Lazy, Passive, And Self-indulgent Consumptiveness At The Bottom-and All Of Us Are Involved In It.

Much Of Our Waste Problem Is To Be Accounted For By The Intentional Flimsiness And Unrepairability Of The Labor-savers And Gadgets That We Have Become Addicted To.

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.

There Are Not Enough Rich And Powerful People To Consume The Whole World; For That, The Rich And Powerful Need The Help Of Countless Ordinary People.

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.

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.

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

We Weren't Allowing Our Hopes To Become Expectations. Expectations Are Tempting, Pleasant, Maybe Necessary. They Are Scary Too, Once You Have Had Some Experience. They Are Not Necessarily And Not Always A Bucket Of Smoke, But They Can Be And Are Even Likely To Be.

The Ability To Speak Exactly Is Intimately Related To The Ability To Know Exactly.

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

The World Is Whole Beyond Human Knowing.

Don't Own So Much Clutter That You Will Be Relieved To See Your House Catch Fire.

The Only True And Effective "operator's Manual For Spaceship Earth" Is Not A Book That Any Human Will Ever Write; It Is Hundreds Of Thousands Of Local Cultures.

A Teacher's Major Contribution May Pop Out Anonymously In The Life Of Some Ex-student's Grandchild. A Teacher, Finally, Has Nothing To Go On But Faith, A Student Nothing To Offer In Return But Testimony.

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.

Our Land Passes In And Out Of Our Bodies Just As Our Bodies Pass In And Out Of Our Land

Outdoors We Are Confronted Everywhere With Wonders; We See That The Miraculous Is Not Extraordinary, But The Common Mode Of Existence. It Is Our Daily Bread.

The Good Of The Whole Of Creation, The World And All Its Creatures Together, Is Never A Consideration Because It Is Never Thought Of; Our Culture Now Simply Lacks The Means For Thinking Of It.

We Have Forgotten That Vietnam, And Iraq Resent Being Invaded And Know The Ground Better Than We Do.

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.

These Are People Who Are Capable Of Devotion, Public Devotion, To Justice. They Meant What They Said And Every Day That Passes, They Mean It More.

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

The Industrial Mind Is A Mind Without Compunction; It Simply Accepts That People, Ultimately, Will Be Treated As Things And That Things, Ultimately, Will Be Treated As Garbage. (a Defense Of The Family Farm, 1986)

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

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.

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.

It's The Impeded Stream That Sings

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.

The Earth Is What We All Have In Common.

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.

Especially Among Christians In Positions Of Wealth And Power, The Idea Of Reading The Gospels And Keeping Jesus' Commandments As Stated Therein Has Been Replaced By A Curious Process Of Logic. According To This Process, People First Declare Themselves To Be Followers Of Christ, And Then They Assume That Whatever They Say Or Do Merits The Adjective "christian".

A Change Of Heart Or Of Values Without A Practice Is Only Another Pointless Luxury Of A Passively Consumptive Way Of Life.

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

And I Knew That The Spirit That Had Gone Forth To Shape The World And Make It Live Was Still Alive In It. I Just Had No Doubt. I Could See That I Lived In The Created World, And It Was Still Being Created. I Would Be Part Of It Forever. There Was No Escape. The Spirit That Made It Was In It, Shaping It And Reshaping It, Sometimes Lying At Rest, Sometimes Standing Up And Shaking Itself, Like A Muddy Horse, And Letting The Pieces Fly.

The Most Available Example Of How Poetry Works For A Poet Is Yourself, And Yet You'll Probably Be The Last One To Know Exactly How You're Serving The Art And How The Art Is Serving You.

...and We Pray, Not For New Earth Or Heaven, But To Be Quiet In Heart, And In Eye Clear. What We Need Is Here.

Laughter Is Immeasurable. Be Joyful

The Difference Between A Path And A Road Is Not Only The Obvious One. A Path Is Little More Than A Habit That Comes With Knowledge Of A Place. It Is A Sort Of Ritual Of Familiarity. As A Form, It Is A Form Of Contact With A Known Landscape. It Is Not Destructive. It Is The Perfect Adaptation, Through Experience And Familiarity, Of Movement To Place; It Obeys The Natural Contours; Such Obstacles As It Meets It Goes Around.

You Have Been Given Questions To Which You Cannot Be Given Answers. You Will Have To Live Them Out - Perhaps A Little At A Time.' And How Long Is That Going To Take?' I Don't Know. As Long As You Live, Perhaps.' That Could Be A Long Time.' I Will Tell You A Further Mystery,' He Said. 'it May Take Longer.

The Pleasure Of Eating Should Be An Extensive Pleasure, Not That Of The Mere Gourmet. People Who Know The Garden In Which Their Vegetables Have Grown And Know That The Garden Is Healthy Will Remember The Beauty Of The Growing Plants, Perhaps In The Dewy First Light Of Morning When Gardens Are At Their Best. Such A Memory Involves Itself With The Food And Is One Of The Pleasures Of Eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures Of Eating)

The Primary Motive For Good Care And Good Use Of The Land-community Is Always Going To Be Affection, Which Is Too Often Lacking.

All Right, Every Day Ain't Going To Be The Best Day Of Your Life, Don't Worry About That. If You Stick To It You Hold The Possibility Open That You Will Have Better Days.

If You Grow A Garden You Are Going To Shed Some Sweat, And You Are Going To Spend Some Time Bent Over; You Will Experience Some Aches And Pains. But It Is In The Willingness To Accept This Discomfort That We Strike The Most Telling Blow Against The Power Plants And What They Represent.

Rural Poverty Happens Because People Aren't Being Paid To Take Adequate Care Of Their Places. There's Lots Of Work To Do Here. And You Can't Afford To Pay Anybody To Do It! If You Depress The Price Of The Products Of The Place Below A Certain Level, People Can't Afford To Maintain It. And That's The Rural Dilemma.

The Real Work Of Planet-saving Will Be Small, Humble, And Humbling, And (insofar As It Involves Love) Pleasing And Rewarding. Its Jobs Will Be Too Many To Count, Too Many To Report, Too Many To Be Publicly Noticed Or Rewarded, Too Small To Make Anyone Rich Or Famous.

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.

The Poem Is Important, But Not More Than The People Whose Survival It Serves.

Far From Making Peace, Wars Invariably Serve As Classrooms And Laboratories Where Men And Techniques And States Of Mind Are Prepared For The Next War.

The Two Ideas, Justice And Vocation, Are Inseparable.... It Is By Way Of The Principle And Practice Of Vocation That Sanctity And Reverence Enter Into The Human Economy. It Was Thus Possible For Traditional Cultures To Conceive That "to Work Is To Pray." (pg. 258, The Idea Of A Local Economy)

Healing Is Impossible In Loneliness; It Is The Opposite Of Loneliness. Conviviality Is Healing. To Be Healed We Must Come With All The Other Creatures To The Feast Of Creation. (pg.99, "the Body And The Earth")

To Go In The Dark With A Light Is To Know The Light. To Know The Dark, Go Dark. Go Without Sight, And Find That The Dark, Too, Blooms And Sings, And Is Traveled By Dark Feet And Dark Wings.

A Significant Part Of The Pleasure Of Eating Is In One’s Accurate Consciousness Of The Lives And The World From Which Food Comes.

The "developed" Nations Had Given To The "free Market" The Status Of A God, And Were Sacrificing To It Their Farmers, Farmlands, And Communities, Their Forests, Wetlands, And Prairies, Their Ecosystems And Watersheds. They Had Accepted Universal Pollution And Global Warming As Normal Costs Of Doing Business.

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

I Would Like You To Show Me, If You Can, Where The Line Can Be Drawn Between An Organism And It's Environment. The Environment Is In You. It's Passing Through You. You're Breathing It In And Out. You And Every Other Creature.

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

A Man's Life Is Always Dealing With Permanence, That Is The Most Dangerous Kind Of Irresponsibility Is To Think Of Your Doings As Temporary.

When There Are Enough People On The Land To Use It But Not Enough To Husband It, Then The Wildness Of The Soil That We Call Fertility Begins To Diminish, And The Soil Itself Begins To Flee From Us In Water And Wind.

I Began To Know My Story Then. Like Everybody's, It Was Going To Be The Story Of Living In The Absence Of The Dead. What Is The Thread That Holds It All Together? Grief, I Thought For A While. And Grief Is There Sure Enough, Just About All The Way Through. From The Time I Was A Girl I Have Never Been Far From It. But Grief Is Not A Force And Has No Power To Hold. You Only Bear It. Love Is What Carries You, For It Is Always There, Even In The Dark, Or Most In The Dark, But Shining Out At Times Like Gold Stitches In A Piece Of Embroidery.

During The Last 17 Years... I Have Been Working At The Restoration Of A Once Exhausted Hillside. Its Scars Are Now Healed Over, Though Still Visible, And This Year It Has Provided Abundant Pasture, More Than In Any Year Since We Have Owned It. But To Make It As Good As It Is Now Has Taken 17 Years. If I Had Been A Millionaire Or If My Family Had Been Starving, It Would Still Have Taken 17 Years. It Can Be Better Than It Is Now, But That Will Take Longer. For It To Live Fully In Its Own Responsibility, As It Did Before Bad Use Ran It Down, May Take Hundreds Of Years.

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

As Long As We Insist On Relating To It Strictly On Our Own Terms-as Strange To Us Or Subject To Us-the Wilderness Is Alien, Threatening, Fearful. We Have No Choice Then But To Become Its Exploiters, And To Lose, By Consequence, Our Place In It. It Is Only When, By Humility, Openness, Generosity, Courage, We Make Ourselves Able To Relate To It On Its Terms That It Ceases To Be Alien.

We Cannot Comprehend What Comprehends Us.

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

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.

Protest That Endures, I Think, Is Moved By A Hope Far More Modest Than That Of Public Success: Namely, The Hope Of Preserving Qualities In One's Own Heart And Spirit That Would Be Destroyed By Acquiescence.

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.

And So There Would Always Be More To Remember That Could No Longer Be Seen...our History Is Always Returning To A Little Patch Of Weeds And Saplings With An Old Chimney Sticking Up By Itself...and Here I Look Ahead To The Resting Of My Case: I Love The House That Belonged To The Chimney, Holding It Bright In Memory, And Love The Saplings And The Weeds.

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Geraldine Brooks

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