The 3rd Sabbath of August

The Gardener

by Ken Weisner

You get down on your knees in the dark earth--alone

for hours in hot sun, yanking weed roots, staking trellises,

burning your shoulders, swatting gnats; you strain your muscled

midwestern neck and back, callous your pianist's hands.

You cut roses back so they won't fruit, rip out and replace

spent annuals. You fill your garden dense with roots and vines.

And when a humble sprout climbs like a worm up out of death,

you are there to bless it, in your green patch, all spring and summer long,

hose like a scepter, a reliquary vessel; you hum

through the dreamy wilderness--no one to judge, absolve,

or be absolved--purified by labor, confessed by its whisperings,

connected to its innocence. So when you heft a woody, brushy tangle, or stumble

inside grimy, spent by earth, I see all the sacraments in place--

and the redeemed world never smelled so sweet.

On Good Workmanship and Materialism

"To me, this means simply that we are not safe in assuming that we can preserve wildness by making wilderness preserves. Those of us who see that wildness and wilderness need to be preserved are going to have to understand the dependence of these things upon our domestic economy and our domestic behavior. If we do not have an economy capable of valuing in particular terms the durable good of localities and communities, then we are not going to be able to preserve anything. We are going to have to see that, if we want our forests to last, then we must make wood products that last, for our forests are more threatened by shoddy workmanship than by clear-cutting or by fire. Good workmanship--that is, careful, considerate, and loving work--requires us to think considerately of the whole process, natural and cultural, involved in the making of wooden artifacts, because the good worker does not share the industrial contempt for 'raw material.' The good worker loves the board before it becomes a table, loves the tree before it yields the board, loves the forest before it gives up the tree. The good worker understands that a badly made artifact is both an insult to its user and a danger to its source. We could say, then, that good forestry begins with the respectful husbanding of the forest that we call stewardship and ends with well-made tables and chairs and houses, just as good agriculture begins with stewardship of the fields and ends with good meals."

"...Our present economy, by contrast, does not account for affection at all, which is to say that it does not account for value. It is simply a description of the career of money as it preys upon both nature and human society. Apparently because our age is so manifestly unconcerned for the life of the spirit, many people conclude that it places an undue value on material things. But that cannot be so, for people who valued material things would take care of them and would care for the sources of them. We could argue that an age that properly valued and cared for material things would be an age properly spiritual. In my part of the country, the Shakers, "unworldly" as they were, were the true materialists, for they truly valued materials. And they valued them in the only way that such things can be valued in practice: by good workmanship, both elegant and sound. The so-called materialism of our own time is, by contrast, at once indifferent to spiritual concerns and insatiably destructive of the material world. And I would call our economy, not materialistic, but abstract, intent upon the subversion of both spirit and matter by abstractions of value and of power. In such an economy, it is impossible to value anything that one has. What one has (house or job, spouse or car) is only valuable insofar as it can be exchanged for what one believes that one wants - a limitless economic process based upon boundless dissatisfaction."

Wendell Berry - "Preserving Wildness" from Home Economics.

This thinking I can vouch for wholeheartedly.  The connection implicit with good work, locally done is undeniable.  Not only for the reason that good craftsmanship lasts but for the reason that there is a spiritual value in the work as accomplished by neighbor, brother, or self that is absent in the partical board, screw job at Walmart.  I throw it in and I throw it out.  Perhaps to the chagrin of some, I will never throw out my dining room table, my bed frame, nor my bookshelf.  These are things crafted from my own hand, invested in and carefully made.  The thought of replacing them is painful.  It would be as if I replaced a part of myself. 

"...For human beings the spiritual and the practical are, and should be, inseparable.  Alone, practicality becomes dangerous; spirituality, alone, becomes feeble and pointless.  Alone, either becomes dull.  Each is the other's discipline, in a sense, and in good work the two are joined."

Wendell Berry - Preserving Wildness from Home Economics

The 2nd Sabbath of August

Sentimental Education

by Tony Hoagland

And when we were eight, or nine,

our father took us back into the Alabama woods,

found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife

pried off a slab of bark

to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs

that we would have to eat in a time of war.

"The ones who will survive," he told us,

looking at us hard,

"are the ones who are willing to do anything."

Then he popped one of those pale slugs

into his mouth and started chewing.

And that was Lesson Number 4

in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.

I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,

who was identical to me,

and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,

we didn't have a prayer,

and next thing I remember, I'm working for a living

at a boring job

that I'm afraid of losing,

with a wife whose lack of love for me

is like a lack of oxygen,

and this dead thing in my chest

that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, "Dad,

you were right! I ate a lot of stuff

far worse than bugs."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,

I was picked up

and chewed

and swallowed

down into the belly of the world.

On Cigars

From And Now, After Dinner, The Cigar.

"Biblical scholars hotly contest a question to which there is no obvious or certain answer: on which day did God create cigars?

Why this problem should be the object of such heated debate, especially given the paucity of textual evidence, is anyone’s guess. It is clear that, absent anything definitive in the textus receptus, Right Reason alone (that is to say, reason informed by caritas) must be our guide.

Now I’m not going to say anything more about the originary problem—for that is not my concern here—than that I would place the creation of cigars somewhere near The Beginning for the simple reason that it’s hard to imagine the fiat lux echoing more than a couple of times before someone thought to touch the lux to some really fine, cured and carefully rolled tobacco.

So: light, then men, then vegetation. Cigars almost certainly followed fast upon these three.

The problem is, so did women, which is why in the fullness of time Chesterton was obliged to say, “most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love seeking to destroy Comradeship.”

Notwithstanding the small number of women who willingly suffer their men to linger over the cigars (Mom! They don’t make ‘em like you anymore!), and indeed the even smaller number of women who actually smoke them (I’m not sure where I stand on this—for obvious reasons), it is generally the case, near as I can tell, that women were created mainly to keep men from enjoying themselves too much over the cigars.

...Whereupon the men will adjourn. They won’t fully enjoy themselves, of course, because they know that what they’re about to do will set them back a bit, but they’ll adjourn nonetheless. Consequence is something they’ve learned to suffer willingly.

Now if you’re going to risk the consequences, there are three things you must keep in mind as you buy your three or four nights in the doghouse: the third is the kind of cigar itself; the second is what to put in the snifter; the first is where to go.

As for the third: if you’re rich, buy good cigars. Really really good ones. I have no experience of them, so my advice is limited to this: ask someone who knows.

But if you are not rich, find a middling cigar that won’t scorch your tongue or send you reeling. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets. And truth be told you don’t actually need the kind of cigar you find between the hairy knuckles and gaudy rings of some fat cat golf hack. A Churchill reject will do the job just fine. Occasionally you’ll get one that won’t smoke, so you might want to get two just in case, but don’t break the bank just because someone in some magazine has said disparaging things about all us cheap bastards. We cheap bastards are doing just fine.

But of course you don’t want an over-the-counter cigar that comes in a little three-quarter box with cellophane over it. That’s beneath human dignity. It’s for bait fishermen who have never wielded a fly rod..."

Jason Peters - Front Porch Republic

On Sunday Reading and Wildness

Sunday mornings are my Wendell time.  The boy's are putzing around the house and there's a warm easy atmosphere with nothing to do before church.  I pick up Wendell and sit for a couple hours.  I usually leave the chair both inspired and depressed.  There's so much wrong and I've so little will power and opportunity.  But I also leave with a better understanding of things albeit with little I can hope to achieve.  At least the change of architecture in my thinking has value even though the change is hard and labored.  I just finished Berry's "Preserving Wildness."  Fantastic essay that I had to read twice.  Actually I have to read all of Wendell's stuff twice.  That's a confession I suppose. 

. . If I had to choose, I would join the nature extremists against the technology extremists, but this choice seems poor, even assuming that it is possible. I would prefer to stay in the middle, not to avoid taking sides, but because I think the middle is a side, as well as the real location of the problem.

The middle, of course, is always rather roomy and bewildering territory, and so I should state plainly the assumptions that define the ground on which I intend to stand:

1. We live in a wilderness, in which we and our works occupy a tiny space and play a tiny part. We exist under its dispensation and by its tolerance.

2. This wilderness, the universe, is somewhat hospitable to us, but it is also absolutely dangerous to us (it is going to kill us, sooner or later), and we are absolutely dependent upon it.

3. That we depend upon what we are endangered by is a problem not solvable by "problem solving." It does not have what the nature romantic or the technocrat would regard as a solution. We are not going back to the Garden of Eden, nor are we going to manufacture an Industrial Paradise.

4. There does exist a possibility that we can live more or less in harmony with our native wilderness; I am betting my life that such a harmony is possible. But I do not believe that it can be achieved simply or easily or that it can ever be perfect, and I am certain that it can never be made, once and for all, but is the forever unfinished lifework of our species.

5. It is not possible (at least, not for very long) for humans to intend their own good specifically or exclusively. We cannot intend our good, in the long run, without intending the good of our place-which means, ultimately, the good of the world.

6. To use or not to use nature is not a choice that is available to us; we can live only at the expense of other lives. Our choice has rather to do with how and how much to use. This is not a choice that can be decided satisfactorily in principle or in theory; it is a choice intransigently impractical. That is, it must be worked out in local practice because, by necessity, the practice will vary somewhat from one locality to another. There is, thus, no practical way that we can intend the good of the world; practice can only be local.

7. If there is no escape from the human use of nature, then human good cannot be simply synonymous with natural good.

What these assumptions describe, of course, is the human predicament. It is a spiritual predicament, for it requires us to be properly humble and grateful; time and again, it asks us to be still and wait. But it is also a practical problem, for it requires us to do things. 

Wendell Berry - "Preserving Wildness" in Home Economics.

The First Sabbath of August

Why I am Not a Vegetarian

by David Oliveira

It's not that I love animals less,

a case could be made I love them more--

and it's not that I love vegetables less, I love them rare, nothing more savory than raw celery clawing and kicking its way down the gullet.

What I find hard to stomach is vegetarians.

If there is a vegetarian at the table, we all get called in to be witnesses at a police lineup.

Cheese, eggs, fish,

each suspect paraded for identification-- pronounced innocent, guilty, please take two steps forward.

And it's not like there is just one canon for the good host to worry about.

Each vegetarian comes with a different menu.

Most won't eat anything that had legs,

though many eat fish, a fin nothing like a leg, And eat shrimp, that have legs which count as fins since they come from the sea and taste so good in a Newburg sauce.

Oysters are problematic, without legs and from the sea, but mostly eaten alive, like carrots.

A few pass on eggs because of the latent leg potential, though pasta is usually okay, the potential hard to realize under the marinara.

One friend doesn't drink milk

but asks for extra au jus

for his mashed potatoes. I haven't the heart to explain what kind of vegetable the "au" is or how many get squeezed to make a cup of "jus."

Don't misunderstand,

I admire those who stand on principle,

however vague, who doesn't admire

the resolve of, say, a Jerry Falwell,

to bear the weight of so much conviction he can hardly walk to church.

Praise the Lord for limousines.

As my mother would say,

"Live and let live--

Just keep the details to yourself,

And pass the ketchup, please."

On Building my Dream Home

This is a home in Wales that a guy built in three months for next to nothing.  Check it out here.  It's a reciprocal framed roof on a timber frame with straw walls rendered with lime and a turf roof.  I will build a house like this.  I just have to find the land and convince Sara that a compost toilet is the wave of the future.  Crapping in a bag of sawdust here I come.

Off Sabbatical

I've been on sabbatical.  There's much to talk about.  I've not found Wendell in my absence.  I've been depressed and hopeful both in the same breath.  I've had slugs and weeds, sink holes and plumbing nightmares, tornados, floods and hail storms.  I've questioned community, dug holes, wandered in the wilderness and watched my boys grow tan and wild.  I've eaten from the garden, watched it wither in parts and bloom in others.  What the hell has been the question of the summer.  Who knew finding Wendell would be such a damned load of work.  Where to begin?

The 4th Sabbath of July

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

The 4th Sabbath of June

Himself

by Thomas Lynch

He'll have been the last of his kind here then.

The flagstones, dry-stone walls, the slumping thatch, out-offices and cow cabins, the patch of haggard he sowed spuds and onions in-- all of it a century out of fashion-- all giving way to the quiet rising damp or hush and vacancy once he is gone.

Those long contemplations at the fire, cats, curling at the door, the dog's lame waltzing, the kettle, the candle and the lamp-- all still, all quenched, all darkened-- the votives and rosaries and novenas, the pope and Kennedy and Sacred Heart, the bucket, the basket, the latch and lock, the tractor that took him into town and back for the pension cheque and messages and pub, the chair, the bedstead and the chamber pot, everything will amount to nothing much.

Everything will slowly disappear.

And some grandniece, a sister's daughter's daughter, one blue August in ten or fifteen years will marry well and will inherit it:

the cottage ruins, the brown abandoned land.

They'll come to see it in a hired car.

The kindly Liverpudlian she's wed,

in concert with a local auctioneer,

will post a sign to offer Site for Sale.

The acres that he labored in will merge

with a neighbor's growing pasturage

and all the decades of him will begin to blur, easing, as the far fields of his holding did, up the hill, over the cliff, into the sea.

The 3rd Sabbath of June

Elegy for the Personal Letter

by Allison Joseph

I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,

the ink blots and crossouts that show

someone lives on the other end, a person

whose hands make errors, leave traces.

I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant

lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory

or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes

dashed off on notebook paper, edges

ragged as their scribbled messages--

can't much write now--thinking of you.

When letters come now, they are formatted

by some distant computer, addressed

to Occupant or To the family living at--

meager greetings at best,

salutations made by committee.

Among the glossy catalogs

and one time only offers

the bills and invoices,

letters arrive so rarely now that I drop

all other mail to the floor when

an envelope arrives and the handwriting

is actual handwriting, the return address

somewhere I can locate on any map.

So seldom is it that letters come

That I stop everything else

to identify the scrawl that has come this far--

the twist and the whirl of the letters,

the loops of the numerals. I open

those envelopes first, forgetting

the claim of any other mail,

hoping for news I could not read

in any other way but this.

The Bean Town Cheer Club

These are my thoughts on Boston's better attributes.

Books literally lining the streets.

Books: There were bookstores around every corner. Used bookstores, new bookstores, children's bookstores, genre bookstores. The urge to fill my suitcase with 50 lbs of paper and leave my worthless clothes behind was almost insurmountable but I resisted. Oh to have even a tenth of those shops. And they weren't filled to the ceiling with Danielle Steele and Stephen King. They were teeming with good books, but I must note, I found no Wendell Berry. Is this indicative of Bostonian character? Yes. Undoubtedly.

150 beers to choose from and your own mug etched with the author's name of your choice to drink them out of if you put them all under your belt. 

Food: I made a pact, a blood oath, a sacred vow, a promise, crossed my heart coronary blockage be damned, that I would eat good food and lots of it. We would not attend to a chain restaurant of any manner in our nine days in Massachusetts. And we ate some good food. And it was easy. There are small little eateries around every corner in the city. We had seafood on the wharf- scallops, calamari, clams, and shrimp all fried to perfection, sandwiches on par with renaissance masterpieces, Tortellini Alfredo on the north side that makes my mouth water with the memory, Canolis and Lobster and all manner of beer and burgers – a vanilla porter at a great local place in Maynard, and Bukowski’s, a literal hole in the wall of a parking garage and the Mecca of beer drinking, the home of the dead authors club, and author itself of one hell of a burger. And then there was the epic fail.

Walden Grille in Concord – home of the laziest Caesar salad in the history of gastronomic Epicureanism. Sara didn’t like much on the menu so she ordered the Caesar, playing it safe. When it arrived it was a plate, with dressing squirted on the bottom, uncut crutons in that and a full head of of romaine lettuce with three salty anchovies flopped over it.

Yes, one of these.  Surprisingly it was at least clean of dirt.

We laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought it may be worthwhile to ask the waitress for a knife to cut that crap up and a salad tong to toss it but Sara managed with a steak knife and a fork. Terrible meal but perhaps the most memorable.

Like this only without the grating, chopping, and tossing.

All this to say at least they have more local institutions than you can count on two hands and quite a bit of local food from area farms.  Albeit, the ubiquitous non connect with anything resembling soil and grass was quite apparent.  And the prices were astronomical. 

History:  Standing on the old north bridge where the militia stood there ground against the British regulars on April 19th 1775 and reading the inscription on the stone, "I'm not afraid to go, and I haven't a man that's afraid to go," brings a shiver to the back of my neck.  We stood for something in a brief moment.  It renews a certain amount of idealistic hope in your soul to see it.

On Thinking About Wendell

The problem is, my insights are short flashes, followed by melancholy rolling in like thunder.

The Hail in June

Yeah for Gypsy Gardens.

3:00 pm: Received a call from my father that golf ball size hail obliterated the town of Absarokee near where they live and the storm is picking up speed towards us. You may want to cover your garden.

3:01 pm: My sister, who’s visiting us, and wife call and ask where to find buckets and boards. I tell them.

3:02 pm: Leave early from work.

3:05 pm: Text warning to fellow gardeners. Get back comments about an alien invasion and an avant-garde picture titled buckets on dirt.

3:06 pm: It’s a beautiful sunshiny day.

3:10 pm: Get home. Begin assault. For the next hour we bring out sawhorses and chairs and plywood and boards of all shapes and sizes and a sled and cardboard and every bucket I own. I cover the garden and the flowers and then I screw it all down.

4:10 pm: The yard is transformed into a gypsy garden. I mow the lawn for good measure just because I’m on a roll. Dark clouds have moved in from the west.

4:15 pm: The rain starts. The boys are wound up tight as drums. Zander’s giving me minutely weather updates. Storms are exciting.

4:20 pm: No hail yet. Rain’s picking up strength and a good wind moves it around a bit. I’ll admit that if it doesn’t hail then I’ll be a little disappointed.

4:30 pm: The rain is pounding down now and pea sized hail is coming down with it. Torrent may be an appropriate adjective. The gypsy hovel I put on the garden resists the storm.  I think of it as the Argo, Jason's ship consecrated by Athena and given a magical 5 gallon bucket from the sacred shop of Sayer which could speak and render prophecies. Or it may be the two dozen screws I drilled into it. Either way we drink wine and watch the flood commence.

4:40 pm. The window well is filling with water. I watch it in horror. I’ve no buckets left to bail with.

4:45 pm. I empty all my tools out of my tool bucket into a big pile in the laundry room and consecrate it for the cause.

4:50 pm. I’m up to my nuts in ice water bailing like a mad man. Perhaps my metaphor of a ship in a storm was a little too apt.

5:00 pm. The rain lets up. The house doesn’t flood. The garden is whole. All is well.

5:15 pm. Eat dinner. Give thanks.

On Gardening

Returning from some time away to a garden is a most depressing affair. 

Return from Boston

Though I didn't happen to mention it last week, perhaps as much out of guilt as complacency, I just returned from Boston and a much anticipated 9 days there.  We expunged a good amount of jet fuel and endured a lengthy amount of coralling, molesting, marching, sitting, and general boredom to get there and back.  But the time there was well worth it for a number of reasons.  I'm sitting now and thinking about our experiences there and hoping to get some insights about my own place and things in general. 

My first realization was I'm glad I don't live there.  As the saying goes; its a nice place to visit but for the traffic, garbage, assholes, and humid, pungent stink.  There were a lot of redeeming reasons to visit Bean Town but I would hate, loathe and despise living there.  It is the nature of travel for myself that makes me rethink my place and miss it dearly.  I'd be intrigued to hear Wendell talk of his time in New York when he first left home and went to be educated and began his professorship there and how that affected his view of home and place.  He hasn't talked about it at any length that I can remember but I have to wonder if it can be good to leave home and come back again?  Can it be necessary? 

2nd Sabbath of June

Shopping

by Faith Shearin

My husband and I stood together in the new mall

which was clean and white and full of possibility.

We were poor so we liked to walk through the stores

since this was like walking through our dreams.

In one we admired coffee makers, blue pottery

bowls, toaster ovens as big as televisions. In another,

we eased into a leather couch and imagined

cocktails in a room overlooking the sea. When we

sniffed scented candles we saw our future faces,

softly lit, over a dinner of pasta and wine. When

we touched thick bathrobes we saw midnight

swims and bathtubs so vast they might be

mistaken for lakes. My husband's glasses hurt

his face and his shoes were full of holes.

There was a space in our living room where

a couch should have been. We longed for

fancy shower curtains, flannel sheets,

shiny silverware, expensive winter coats.

Sometimes, at night, we sat up and made lists.

We pressed our heads together and wrote

our wants all over torn notebook pages.

Nearly everyone we loved was alive and we

were in love but we liked wanting. Nothing

was ever as nice when we brought it home.

The objects in stores looked best in stores.

The stores were possible futures and, young

and poor, we went shopping. It was nice

then: we didn't know we already had everything.

The First Sabbath of June

Hands by Jack Ridl

My grandfather grew up holding rags,

pounding his fist into the pocket

of a ball glove, gripping a plumb line

for his father who built what anyone

needed. At sixteen, wanting to work on

his own, he lied about his age

and for forty-nine years carried his lunch

to the assembly line where he stood

tightening bolts on air brake after

air brake along the monotonous belt.

I once asked him how he did that all

those years. He looked at me, said,

"I don't understand. It was only

eight hours a day," then closed

his fists. Every night after dinner

and a pilsner, he worked some more.

In the summer, he'd turn the clay,

grow tomatoes, turnips, peas,

and potatoes behind borders

of bluebells and English daisies,

and marigolds to keep away the rabbits.

When the weather turned to frost,

he went to the basement where,

until the seeds came in March,

he made perfect picture frames, each

glistening with layers of sweet shellac.

His hands were never bored. Even

in his last years, arthritis locking every

knuckle, he sat in the kitchen carving

wooden houses you could set on a shelf,

one after another, each one different.

On Household

According to the industrial formula, the ideal human residence (from the Latin residere, "to sit back" or "remain sitting") is one on which the residers do not work. The house is built, equipped, decorated, and provisioned by other people, by strangers.  In it, the married couple practice as few as possible of the disciplines of household or homestead. Their domestic labor consists principally, of buying things, putting things away, and throwing things away, but it is understood that it is, "best" to have even those jobs done by an "inferior" person, and the ultimate industrial ideal is a "home" in which everything, would be done by pushing buttons. In such a "home," a married couple are mates, sexually, legally, and socially, but they are not helpmates; they do nothing useful either together or for each other. According to the ideal, work should be done away from home. When such spouses say to each other, "I will love you forever," the meaning of their words is seriously impaired by their circumstances; they are speaking in the presence of so little that they have done and made. Their history together is essentially placeless; it has no visible or tangible incarnation. They have only themselves in view.

Wendell - Men and Women In Search of Common Ground

I have to decline Wendell's assumption that this is a condition of the industrial age.  The industrial age makes this lifestyle available to all you desire it but it is not the progenitor of the thinking behind it.  This has always been our desire as long as history itself.  The taking and owning of slaves to do your work is the equivalent of major appliance shopping at Sears.  If only they'd had consumer reports at the slave block.  Life would have been so much easier for those poor old timers.    Alas.

Hmm, but it continues. 

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, “mine” is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as “ours.”

This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. Such a household economy may employ the disciplines and skills of housewifery, of carpentry and other trades of building and maintenance, of gardening and other branches of subsistence agriculture, and even of woodlot management and wood-cutting. It may also involve a “cottage industry” of some kind, such as a small literary enterprise.

Wendell - Feminisim, the Body and the Machine

Damn you Berry and your small literary enterprise and your housewifery and carpentry and all of it.  I think even in the moments of achievment, such as the first tiny, dirty vegetable from the garden in July to the finishing touchs on a new bathroom we've sweated and bleed for for two years, we're still stuck in a cycle of macroeconomics that is terribly difficult to break from if only because land itself is astronomically priced and without dirt none of this is really worth talking about.  I'll have to explore more on that later.  Perhaps I'm being over negative because Berry, often enough, strikes nerves and convicts conscience with his measures and presents for myself a world that is both beautiful and dark.  It seems to be something unachievable.  Is this bad? 

On Gardening

Wendellian Cucs

The plants are in the ground.  Onions, Cabbage (Why?), Jalapenos, Green peppers, Tomatoes, Raspberries, Strawberries, Rhubarb, Cucumbers, Squash, Lettuce, Cantaloupe, and Pole Beans.  I rebuilt the garden space to better use the sun by flipping it over and putting my walking path along the fence in the shade as well as cutting the fence down by a few slats.  I like a short fence anyway.  This isn't the first year we've gardened and I like to think I've learned at least a few things in the past, such as sun is good and water too, but it is still mostly a vast mystery.  For example, in the course of a week the cucumbers are already almost dead.  This is a fell blow to my soul. 

The dill is coming up nicely in the barrels and the cucumbers are brown withered little misanthropes.  Though not a true definition of irony, its at least poetic injustice.  I've a few theories about this.  One: I'm a rotten gardener and the very act of touching plants make them wither into pitiful husks of their former glory.  Two: cucumber predestination as an act of God.  Three: Not enough water (Which not even a retard would consider if they were outside in their small bus for even a few hours this week.  Rain, rain, rain.)  I watered them more anyway.  Four: my cucumbers are actually retarded like me.  Five:  my cucumbers have always been diseased and malformed but were painted green by an unscrupulous corporate fat cat till exposed to five days of rain and a retarded waterer.  I like this theory a lot (responsibility displacement.)  Six: fifty degree days and forty degree nights are hard on cucumbers who are like the surfer dudes of the plant world, named Nancy, wear skirts, shave their chest hair, eat microwave burritos and say dude a lot.  And it may be that they don't like being transplanted all that much (aka ripped from the earth and stuffed in a cold dark hole in the wilds of Montana.)  All that said they withered up and made for the fetal position.

My sad excuse for a cuc. 

All may be lost on them but I dug a few milk jugs out of the garbage, cut off the bases, and covered the wee little sissies.  We'll see if they survive.  If not then I'll try again cause I love pickles.  A lot.  And if that means satisfying a bunch of pansy little gourds then so be it.

The Last Sabbath of May

Books

by Billy Collins

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus

I can hear the library humming in the night,

a choir of authors murmuring inside their books

along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,

Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,

each one stitched into his own private coat,

together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,

shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,

a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie

as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,

or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.

He moves from paragraph to paragraph

as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me

from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,

and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,

the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,

a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,

walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,

or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,

straining in circles of light to find more light

until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs

that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

when evening is shadowing the forest

and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,

we have to listen hard to hear the voices

of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

On Isolation and Individualism

A few of Wendell's thoughts that have intrigued me, although I'm not sure how to illucidate them with life.  Many of his thoughts would seem most apt to those who are already intrinsically tied to them for they are intuitive as much as they are anything.  They are dug into actual dirt and their metaphors are not metaphors.  When Wendell says common ground he means just that.  For the rest then they at times seem like dirges.

"More and more," Mary Catharine Bateson wrote in With a Daughter’s Eye, "it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error."

...On the other hand, it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe. These ways are practical, proper, available to everybody, and they can provide for the safekeeping of the small acreages of the universe that have been entrusted to us. Moreover, they give the word "love" its only chance to mean, for only they can give it a history, a community, and a place. Only in such ways can love become flesh and do its worldly work. For example, a marriage without a place, a household, has nothing to show for itself. Without a history of some length, it does not know what it means. Without a community to exert a shaping pressure around it. It may explode because of the pressure inside it.

...Our choice may be between a small, human-sized meaning and a vast meaninglessness, or between the freedom of our virtues and the freedom of our vices. It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are. In our industrial society, in which people insist so fervently on their value and their freedom "as individuals," individuals are seen more and more as "units" by their governments, employers, and suppliers. They live, that is, under the rule of the interchangeability of parts: what one person can do, another person can do just as well or a newer person can do better. Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known; people become, as they say and feel, nobodies.

It is only in these trying circumstances that human love is given its chance to have meaning, for it is only in these circumstances that it can be born out in deeds through time -"even," to quote Shakespeare again, "to the edge of doom"- and thus prove itself true by fulfilling its true term.

Wendell Berry - Men and Women in Search of Common Ground

The 4th Sabbath of May

Family Garden

by Hank Hudepohl

Tell me again about your garden

Tell me how you planted, in the small

flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil

then you dropped in three dark bean seeds

for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,

but the fenced garden opened freely

to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached

from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,

the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.

Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled

your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.

You gave away honey from the white hive too,

that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey

nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.

The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known

by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,

if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked

summer evenings from a chair on the porch

tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

On Gardening

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. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at a store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and re-use its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people.

-Wendell Berry from Think Little

It’s finally spring. With the snow earlier this month, (my brother who lives closer to the mountains got fourteen inches) and the below freezing temperatures every night, its been a glorious romp in the flowers, (of which, our tulips were blasted into instant oblivion while covered in a sheet of ice.) But now, its eighty degrees and I stand on the threshold of greatness. That is, I stand in the arbor leading into the garden, a nest of weeds, dried stalks, vines, and garbage. It’s been a long hard winter.

On mother’s day it was beautiful and we planted our peas against the garage and the herbs in big whiskey barrels nearby. This is new territory for gardening. We’ve decided to put a few things here and there about the homestead to change things up a bit. I like a little variety and wildness in my landscaping which brings me full circle to the scourge we call “The Weed”. I’m not talking dandelions which are the quaint native peoples of the yard world. I’m talking Japanese Knotweed, also known as Mexican Bamboo, Fleece Flower, Monkey Weed, Hancock's Curse, Elephant Ears, Pea Shooters, or Donkey Rhubarb, which is the Mongol horde of the plant world. I mean, if in due time you can manage to be nicknamed a Mexican, a monkey, a curse and an ass then your doing something wrong, or right depending on who’s side your on. I’ve been battling it for years by picking it and slapping it around a little and to no avail. Some years past I gave up and let it grow and boy did it grow. A great green swath of towering stalks covered the side of the garage and exploded in bunches of small white blooms that the bees found irresistible and commenced to swarm the back yard for a good part of the summer. Pandora would be proud.

I like to call it the BFW and that isn’t an elderly association.

This year I’ve unleashed shock and awe. Donkey Rhubarb, (I’ve decided this to be one of my favorite names of it.) is a Rhizome which means that for what you see up here there is ten times that down there and it will never go away. Ever. It can go nine feet deep and twenty four feet horizontal. It’s the definition of incorrigible and corrig it I have.

Fighting Donkey Rhubarb is like taking on a terrorist insurgency. Let me explain. I spent six years trying to be nice and Wendell may or may not have been proud at the back breaking labor of pulling six foot tall weeds just to have them grow back up again in a week. I’ve since resorted to chemical warfare but even that has been a stop gap at minimum. Round-uping the BFW causes it to merely drool uncontrollably and bare its teeth at us. I believe this is in part because Mr Kurtz (more on the name later) crosses the border to the neighbor’s side whenever I engage him directly, seeks protection from the indigenous population – the roses, peonies, poppies, and horseradish and is over all a real bad ass. (I’m talking an Apache, Mujahedeen, Vietcong, William Wallace who drinks his own piss and shaves with a Claymore.) This is classic Guerrilla warfare.

This year I’ve gone Apocolypse Now on the Donkey Rhubarb and Mr Kurtz doesn’t stand a chance.

Most soldiers engaged in combat are encouraged to dehumanize their enemy in order to ease the killing process. I’ve chosen the opposite approach mostly so I don’t feel like a complete retard when I’m outmatched, outgunned, and outwitted by a plant. (You know – a photosynthesizing, mitochondrial crapping, green, and leafy plant.)  “That Mr Kurtz is a real badass,” I’ll say when I come into the house covered in dirt and blood – mud streaks running down my tear stained face after an afternoon of combat.

Yippe-Ki-Yay. 

Let me recap. Of course Mr Kurtz starts coming up in March. I spray him with roundup. The assault slows but doesn’t decapitate. I cut him down at the knees. Hydra that he is he sprouts two more heads for each I cut off. I cut those down and pour roundup down his gullets like a Herbicidal cocktail. He wilts. April offensive begins. Mr Kurtz sweeps around my flank and hits the horseradish and roses hard. I retreat but not before taking a few of his donkey friends with me. The monkey weed is good but I’ve found an ally. His names Ortho and he's also a bad ass.  I dig up every root ball I can find and cut them in half with a saws all and paint on the Brush B Gone while chuckling maniacally.  I let it soak a while and then cover them up.  May came with no sign yet but just yesterday the little knob of green I'd been dreading appeared.  Is this the Battle of Dien Bien Phu all over?  Is Ortho actually a sissified french man and I didn't know?  We will see.  On Gardening to be continued.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as an impediment of traffic, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration. And his sense of man's dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful.

-Wendell Berry from Think Little

The 3rd Sabbath in May

My Father's Corpse

by Andrew Hudgins

He lay stone still, pretended to be dead.

My brothers and I, tiny, swarmed over him

like puppies. He wouldn't move. We tickled him

tracing our fingers up and down his huge

misshapen feet — then armpits, belly, face.

He wouldn't move. We pushed small fingers up

inside his nostrils, wiggled them, and giggled.

He wouldn't move. We peeled his eyelids back,

stared into those motionless, blurred circles. Still,

he wouldn't, didn't move. Then we, alarmed,

poked, prodded his great body urgently.

Diddy, are you okay? Are you okay?

He didn't move. I reared back, gathered speed,

and slammed my forehead on his face. He rose,

he rose up roaring, scattered us from his body

and, as he raged, we sprawled at his feet – thrilled

to have the resurrected bastard back.

On Work - Again and Again and Again

As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections - as one is now said to work "for a living" or "to support a family" - but enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love.

Wendell - The Body and The Earth

I'm nearly finished.  The tile is up on the walls in the tub; just the ceiling to go.  I'm long ready to be done.  The nice thing is that when your reading Wendell you realize in the midst of it all that this is restorative, convivial, dignified and pleasing.  I didn't know this or even consider this at 10 oclock last night when I emerged hunched, numb and half covered in thinset.  But I of course will consider it now.

If by restorative he means the euphoric feeling of being done and having straight lines and flush tile then yeah I'll buy that.  If by restorative he means crouching in a tub for eight hours like some sick buddhist kamasutra prank then...  If by convivial he means short bursts of congratulations and profanities directed at an inanimate wall and yourself then alright.  If by conviviality he means what I think he means then...  If by dignified he means I've done something for myself that proved difficult and done it, though not perfect, well, then sweet.  If by dignified he means crouching in a tub half naked, covered in mud, and talking to yourself then...

And I am pleased.  I can stand in the bathroom and look at my work and I am pleased.  I'll be even more pleased when I can be done and get on with the gardening and the hammocking and the frolicking about on the summer earth like a true Wendellian.

And in defense of myself I'm not sure I've yet grasped Wendell's view of work.  Not yet.

Work is the health of love.  To last, love must enflesh itself in the materiality of the world - produce food, shelter, warmth or shade, surround itself with careful acts, well-made things. 

Wendell - The Body and The Earth

The 2nd Sabbath of May

iPoem

by George Bilgere

Someone's taken a bite

from my laptop's glowing apple,

the damaged fruit of our disobedience,

of which we must constantly be reminded.

There's the fatal crescent,

the dark smile

of Eve, who never dreamed of a laptop,

who, in fact, didn't even have clothes,

or anything else for that matter,

which was probably the nicest thing

about the Garden, I'm thinking,

as I sit here in the café

with my expensive computer,

afraid to get up even for a minute

in order to go to the bathroom

because someone might steal it

in this fallen world she invented

with a single bite

of an apple nobody, and I mean

nobody,

was going to tell her not to eat.

On Political Packages

A few of our political packages, with a fair dose of humorous ribbing, as defined by Wendell in "The Joys Of Sale Resistance."

The Future, as everybody knows, is a subject of extreme importance to politicians, and we have several political packages that are almost irresistible—expensive, of course, but rare:

1. Tolerance and Multiculturalism. Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven't been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on. Tolerant and multicultural persons hyphenate their land of origin and their nationality. I, for example, am a Kentuckian-American.

2.  Preservation of Human Resources. Despite world-record advances in automation, robotification, and other "labor-saving" technologies, it is assumed that almost every human being may, at least in the Future, turn out to be useful for something, just like the members of other endangered species. Sometimes, after all, the Economy still requires a "human component." At such times, human resources are called "human components," and are highly esteemed in that capacity as long as their usefulness lasts. Therefore, don't quit taking care of human resources yet. See that the schools are run as ideal orphanages or, as ideal jails. Provide preschool and pre-preschool. Also postschool. Keep the children in institutions and away from home as much as possible—remember that their parents wanted children only because other people have them, and are much too busy to raise them. Only the government cares. Move the children around a lot while they're young, for this provides many opportunities for socialization. Show them a lot of TV, for TV is educational. Teach them about computers, for computers still require a "human component." Teach them the three S's: Sex can be Scientific and Safe. When the children grow up, try to keep them busy. Try to see that they become addicted only to legal substances. That's about it.

3. Reduce the Government. the government should only be big enough to annihilate any country and (if necessary) every country, to spy on its citizens and on other governments, to keep big secrets, and to see to the health and happiness of large corporations. A government thus reduced will be almost too small to notice and will require almost no taxes and spend almost no money.

4. The Free Market. The free market sees to it that everything ends up in the right place—that is, it makes sure that only the worthy get rich. All millionaires and billionaires have worked hard for their money, and they deserve the rewards of their work. They need all the help they can get from the government and the universities. Having money stimulates the rich to further economic activity that ultimately benefits the rest of us. Needing money stimulates the rest of us to further economic activity that ultimately benefits the rich. The cardinal principle of the free market is unrestrained competition, which is a kind of tournament that will decide which is the world's champion corporation. Ultimately, thanks to this principle, there will be only one corporation, which will be wonderfully simplifying. After that, we will rest in peace.

5. Unlimited Economic Growth. This is the pet idea of the Party of Hardheaded Realists. That unlimited economic growth can be accomplished within limited space, with limited materials and limited intelligence, only shows the unlimited courage and self-confidence of these Great Minds. That unlimited economic growth implies unlimited consumption, which in turn implies unlimited pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, only makes the prospect even more unlimited.

Or, finally, we might consider the package known as:

6. The Food System, which is one of my favorites. The Food System is firmly grounded on the following principles:

I. Food is important mainly as an article of international trade.

II. It doesn't matter what happens to farmers.

III. It doesn't matter what happens to the land.

IV. Agriculture has nothing to do with "the environment."

V. There will always be plenty of food, for if farmers don't grow it from the soil, then scientists will invent it.

VI. There is no connection between food and health. People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.

VII. It follows that there is no connection between healing and health. Hospitals customarily feed their patients poor-quality, awful-tasting, factory-made expensive food and keep them awake all night with various expensive attentions. There is a connection between money and health.

The 1st Sabbath of May

Wild Geese

by Charles Goodrich

I'm picking beans when the geese fly over, Blue Lake pole beans I figure to blanch and freeze. Maybe pick some dilly beans.  And there will be more beans to give to the neighbors, forcibly if necessary.

The geese come over so low I can hear their wings creak, can see their tail feathers making fine adjustments. They slip-stream along so gracefully, riding on each other's wind, surfing the sky. Maybe after the harvest I'll head south. Somebody told me Puerto Vallarta is nice. I'd be happy with a cheap room. Rice and beans at every meal.  Swim a little, lay on the beach.

Who are you kidding, Charles? You don't like to leave home in the winter. Spring, fall, or summer either. True. But I do love to watch those wild geese fly over, feel these impertinent desires glide through me. Then get back to work.

Never The Authors of Our Best Hope

Sometimes, (should be most times) I just have to let Wendell speak because he says it so damned well.

The conclusion to Wendell's, "Preface: The Joy of Sales Resistance". 

But however much I may change my mind, I will never agree with those saleswomen and salesmen who suggest that if I will only do as they say, all will be fine. All, dear reader, is not going to be fine. Even if we all agreed with all the saints and prophets, all would not be fine. For we would still be mortal, partial, suffering poor creatures, not very intelligent and never the authors of our best hope.

Yours sincerely,

Wendell Berry

On Education

Its good to know that Wendell can be a sarcastic son of a bitch too. Makes me feel better. This is his "Preface: The Joy of Sales Resistance" from Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community all of which is a worthy read.  It's this type of writing and candid snarkiness that endears the old poet to me.  I imagine him walking in from the field at a brisk pace, spinning his desk chair into place, putting his feet up and snapping off a few lead points in his rush to get down the gem of a thought that's just come to him.  Or maybe thats just me minus the gem.  Either way, its his prefaces often enough that make me laugh, frown, squirm and snort with pleasure.  Here's an excerpt. 

Actually, as we know, the new commercial education is fun for everybody. All you have to do in order to have or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and master a few simple truths:

I. Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.

II. Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.

III. The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.

IV. The place where education is to be used is called "your career."

V. Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.

VI. The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.

VII Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.

VIII The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their "field" or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as "professionalism."

IX. The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.

X. The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.

XI The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.

XII. A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.

XIII. Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs.  Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.

XIV. The main thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.

XV. A good school is a big school.

XVI. Disarm the children before you let them in.