More Deliberate Every Day

Thursday Quote

Acorns are on the ground here, leaves are turning.  In the morning, the cool breeze beckons the impending march of Autumn.  I thought it appropriate to share this poem today, in that context.

An Anniversary

What we have been becomes
The country where we are.
Spring goes, summer comes,
And in the heat, as one year
Or a thousand years before,
The fields and woods prepare
The burden of their seed
Out of time's wound, the old
Richness of the fall.  Their deed
Is renewal.  In the household
Of the woods the past
Is always healing in the light,
The high shiftings of the air.
It stands upon its yield
And thrives.  Nothing is lost.
What yields, though in despair,
Opens and rises in the night.
Love binds us to this term
With its yes that is crying
In our marrow to confirm
Life that only lives by dying.
Lovers live by the moon
Whose dark and light are one,
Changing without rest.
The root struts from the seed
In the earth's dark -- harvest
And feast at the edge of sleep.
Darkened, we are carried
Out of need, deep
In the country we have married.

5/29/72

                                    Wendell Berry

Quotable Thursday

I'm short on time this morning, so I'll just leave you with this quick quote to take into your day.  It comes from Wendell Berry's essay "Discipline and Hope":

If the Golden Rule were generally observed among us, the economy would not last a week.  We have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy of the truth.  So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected to yield it right of way.  But I will not get over.  My reason is that I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy.  The economy is no god for me, for I have had too close a look at its wheels.  I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits.  It has emptied the country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities with the dependent and the abject.  It has always sacrificed the small to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap.  It has ridden questionable triumphs over the bodies of small farmers and tradesmen and craftsmen.  I see it, still, driving my neighbors off their farms into the factories.  I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can give themselves a value.  Its principle is to waste and destroy the living substance of the world and the birthright of posterity for a monetary profit that is the most flimsy and useless of human artifacts.

And so the answer is to create a new economy, one that is grounded in just and fair practices, one that values the local and the natural resources that it requires, one that lifts up artisans instead of driving them away.  Thanks Mr. Berry.

Thought for Thursday

"I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.  There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.  All great enterprises are self-supporting.  The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes.  You must get your living by loving."

Henry David Thoreau