Unshapen

-
"Put your hands into the mire.
They will learn the kinship
of the shaped and unshapen,
the living and the dead."
Wendell Berry

Put your hands into the mire, reach into the bright spirit and bloody tissues inside your ribs, feel the diving spirit and grasp at the bright blood, the wise blood and the cold head, the knowing brain and the stony heart and when you have found your kinship with the red clay and the stony loam, then find a place to wait. Get up and run like hell. Lie down and die. Go out find the biggest giant and remove his head. Hold all those close dear and hold all those dear close. Let them go when they turn away and let them return when they turn toward. Leap and lie. Bound and bounden.

The Mad Farmer also tells us:
"Don't worry and fret about the crops. After you have done all you can for them, let them stand in the weather on their own. If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed. But the real products of any year's work are the farmer's mind and the cropland itself. .... Let him receive the seasons increment into his mind. Let him work it into the soil. The finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer."

And "Let my marriage be brought to the ground. Let my love for this woman enrich the earth. What is its happiness but preparing its place? What is its monument but a rich field?"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hearth

-
Image
"A stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a center. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household. The mother built the fire, the children kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood. It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of cold and solace of warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills and the fidelity to daily tasks." (Albert Borgmann: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ) So what is our new center? Warmth is now provided in a completely uniform way requiring no demands on our skill, strength or attention. In fact, the warmth device (central heating system) is c...
Read more

Idolatry in the West

-
"in order to promote killing in civilized societies it must be legalized under deceitful names. Yet liberal societies seem happy to be deceived exactly to the degree to which they have developed into societies of covetousness." Ok ... I know you need more before you know where this is going ... I am reading a book of essays on the ten commandments. This is in a section talking about the relatedness of all ten commandments, primarily through the command not to murder. He goes from there to make the point that we are a society dominated by want and covetousness and the more the claws of greed entangle us (from human traffiking to slave labor for our cheap consumer goods, to "designer babies" and whatever else technology deems to sell) the more we will redefine sin and morality. Bernd Wannenwetsch continues: "the culture of death is essentially marked by the business of redefinition. In defining our own humanity we claim the property rights that entitle us to dist...
Read more