Free shipping on $60+ orders

A Letter to Wendell Berry

“In nature death and decay are as necessary – are, one may almost say, as lively – as life, and so nothing is wasted.” --Wendell Berry, “Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems” from The Gift of Good Land

 

Dear Wendell Berry,

It was inevitable that you too would leave this earth and join the day-blind stars. As for so many others, your passing compels me to reflect on the ways you have touched my life and shaped my thinking.

The first essay I read of yours was probably “The Pleasures of Eating” (from What are People For?), a fitting introduction for me at the time having never been anything except a consumer of food. Your pronouncement that “Eating is an agricultural act” awakened in my 20-year-old activist self the prospect that the ways I interacted with food could be an enactment of my desire to reduce the harm we humans were causing to the planet and to each other.

You were a farm kid who dutifully went to the big city and deliberately and defiantly returned. 40 years later reading your words, I became a 24-year-old city kid who started a hand-scale farm, because “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in one small part of it.”  (“The Body and the Earth,” from The Unsettling of America). I wanted to intimately understand what you spoke so passionately about.

While I entered agriculture fueled by a hyper-critical, self-righteous indignation that seemed in superb company with your own, it was only through the everyday labor of farming that I began to connect with the visceral pleasure of it.

In our culture, young women’s bodies are not for those of us who inhabit them. For me, learning to use my body to do physical work, to grow food to feed myself and my neighbors fueled by the very breakfast I worked to raise, grew a sense of sovereignty within me that fundamentally changed how I moved about in the world.  You put words to the indignity of industry laying claim to our most precious essences as living creatures, but also to the delights that I and many other manual labor novices who joined us on the farm were getting to experience on a daily basis.

“If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people,” you say in one of my most treasured companions, your essay “Economy and Pleasure” (from What Are People For?), “it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is ‘drudgery’ and not worth doing. …That the [work] can be drudgery is obvious. If there is too much of it, if it goes on too long, if one has no interest in it, if one cannot reconcile oneself to the misery involved in it, if one does not like or enjoy the company of one’s fellow workers, then drudgery would be the proper name for it.”  

I feel so fortunate now to be able to say, like you, that “Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.” More fully experiencing the pleasure you articulated deepened my trust of you as a guide of sorts for a life path I chose where I hadn’t yet found closer-at-hand teachers.  

At 29 years old, I chose to bring your words into my wedding ceremony with the hope of grounding our young partnership in these types of day-to-day pleasures: “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…Marriage and care of the earth are each other’s disciplines. Each makes possible the enactment of fidelity toward the other.” ("The Body and the Earth" from The Unsettling of America). Almost two decades later, I still return to this sentiment as the backbone of a lifelong human-to-human commitment, extending it to other lifelong commitments outside of my marriage.

Though you are by no means alone in your public thinking and writing about this, your writings make us grapple with the collective severity of the countless tragedies enacted in specific and unique places across US by white settlers and their descendants—in our feverish attempts to “settle” these places and increase their “productivity” and “economic outputs,” we white folks have proceeded to impoverish the lands themselves and our human cultures who persist entirely in relationship with them. “We have never known what we are doing because we have never known what we are undoing,” you say (“Preserving Wildness,” from Home Economics).

And you require that we reckon not only with the legacies of our destructive actions and policies on the land and our collective well-being, but with the very idea that “we are alive within mystery, by miracle.”  (from Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition). You remind us that for all our attempts to break life down into understandable pieces, our supposed modern “knowledge” is woefully inadequate, the evidence of which is all around us. Again, you are not alone in articulating this—it is a cornerstone of most indigenous philosophies and the subject of so many beautiful, thought-provoking works. But Life is a Miracle helped me personally to name this yearning I felt to bring my bumbling, creaturely self into right relationship with the vastness around me.

Some might take your assertion in your letter to Wes Jackson (from Home Economics) that “To call the unknown by its right name, ‘mystery,’ is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns” as a cautionary tale, but I find it as hopeful and orienting a sentiment as I could ever imagine.

It’s relieving to admit that we don’t know what we’re doing, especially when so much of what we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working. Positioning ourselves accurately as creatures alive within mystery & by miracle provides the proper foundation for finding our way back to a culture which respects and reveres the world and approaches our place within it with humility and curiosity. The invitation to apprentice ourselves to our places and spend our lifetimes reverently studying their long, complex histories and their intertwined present inhabitants feels deeply correct to me.

Right now, a quote from you hangs hand written on a piece of scrap paper on my refrigerator: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.” (“The Real Work” from Standing by Words). These words place me squarely in the exquisite company of thinkers throughout time and space who marvel at the world and wake every day to throw ourselves into wholeheartedly mucking about as participants within it, until the day when we don’t wake and we join you and the others who have passed on before us, leaving our own tiny legacies of lands and relationships tended.

In revisiting your work over these past couple of days, I came back across this quote which feels so apropos for our current moment: “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.” (from Life is a Miracle). Over the years since I first discovered your writings, my own life has marched more steadily toward the life of a machine. I now spend long days in front of a screen and often lose track of the fact that I am an alive creature who is inhabiting a body which is not a machine but nevertheless is at its happiest when it is put to satisfying use. I cannot believe you managed to make it this long and not use a computer or a smart phone. Good on you—these things suck your soul.  

Thank you for patiently inviting us to slow down and stretch out in the open spaces of your words, to unplug and experience the visceral pleasures of outdoor physical work, and to consider better solutions for how we would like to interact with each other and the land moving forward.

Thank you also for cheekily reminding us where to look for those solutions: “Solutions have perhaps the most furtive habits of any creatures; they reveal themselves very hesitantly in artificial light, and never enter air-conditioned rooms.” (“Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest” from The Gift of Good Land).

With deep gratitude,

Casey

A Letter to Wendell Berry

“In nature death and decay are as necessary – are, one may almost say, as lively – as life, and so nothing is wasted.” --Wendell Berry, “Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems” from The Gift of Good Land

 

Dear Wendell Berry,

It was inevitable that you too would leave this earth and join the day-blind stars. As for so many others, your passing compels me to reflect on the ways you have touched my life and shaped my thinking.

The first essay I read of yours was probably “The Pleasures of Eating” (from What are People For?), a fitting introduction for me at the time having never been anything except a consumer of food. Your pronouncement that “Eating is an agricultural act” awakened in my 20-year-old activist self the prospect that the ways I interacted with food could be an enactment of my desire to reduce the harm we humans were causing to the planet and to each other.

You were a farm kid who dutifully went to the big city and deliberately and defiantly returned. 40 years later reading your words, I became a 24-year-old city kid who started a hand-scale farm, because “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in one small part of it.”  (“The Body and the Earth,” from The Unsettling of America). I wanted to intimately understand what you spoke so passionately about.

While I entered agriculture fueled by a hyper-critical, self-righteous indignation that seemed in superb company with your own, it was only through the everyday labor of farming that I began to connect with the visceral pleasure of it.

In our culture, young women’s bodies are not for those of us who inhabit them. For me, learning to use my body to do physical work, to grow food to feed myself and my neighbors fueled by the very breakfast I worked to raise, grew a sense of sovereignty within me that fundamentally changed how I moved about in the world.  You put words to the indignity of industry laying claim to our most precious essences as living creatures, but also to the delights that I and many other manual labor novices who joined us on the farm were getting to experience on a daily basis.

“If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people,” you say in one of my most treasured companions, your essay “Economy and Pleasure” (from What Are People For?), “it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is ‘drudgery’ and not worth doing. …That the [work] can be drudgery is obvious. If there is too much of it, if it goes on too long, if one has no interest in it, if one cannot reconcile oneself to the misery involved in it, if one does not like or enjoy the company of one’s fellow workers, then drudgery would be the proper name for it.”  

I feel so fortunate now to be able to say, like you, that “Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.” More fully experiencing the pleasure you articulated deepened my trust of you as a guide of sorts for a life path I chose where I hadn’t yet found closer-at-hand teachers.  

At 29 years old, I chose to bring your words into my wedding ceremony with the hope of grounding our young partnership in these types of day-to-day pleasures: “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…Marriage and care of the earth are each other’s disciplines. Each makes possible the enactment of fidelity toward the other.” ("The Body and the Earth" from The Unsettling of America). Almost two decades later, I still return to this sentiment as the backbone of a lifelong human-to-human commitment, extending it to other lifelong commitments outside of my marriage.

Though you are by no means alone in your public thinking and writing about this, your writings make us grapple with the collective severity of the countless tragedies enacted in specific and unique places across US by white settlers and their descendants—in our feverish attempts to “settle” these places and increase their “productivity” and “economic outputs,” we white folks have proceeded to impoverish the lands themselves and our human cultures who persist entirely in relationship with them. “We have never known what we are doing because we have never known what we are undoing,” you say (“Preserving Wildness,” from Home Economics).

And you require that we reckon not only with the legacies of our destructive actions and policies on the land and our collective well-being, but with the very idea that “we are alive within mystery, by miracle.”  (from Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition). You remind us that for all our attempts to break life down into understandable pieces, our supposed modern “knowledge” is woefully inadequate, the evidence of which is all around us. Again, you are not alone in articulating this—it is a cornerstone of most indigenous philosophies and the subject of so many beautiful, thought-provoking works. But Life is a Miracle helped me personally to name this yearning I felt to bring my bumbling, creaturely self into right relationship with the vastness around me.

Some might take your assertion in your letter to Wes Jackson (from Home Economics) that “To call the unknown by its right name, ‘mystery,’ is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns” as a cautionary tale, but I find it as hopeful and orienting a sentiment as I could ever imagine.

It’s relieving to admit that we don’t know what we’re doing, especially when so much of what we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working. Positioning ourselves accurately as creatures alive within mystery & by miracle provides the proper foundation for finding our way back to a culture which respects and reveres the world and approaches our place within it with humility and curiosity. The invitation to apprentice ourselves to our places and spend our lifetimes reverently studying their long, complex histories and their intertwined present inhabitants feels deeply correct to me.

Right now, a quote from you hangs hand written on a piece of scrap paper on my refrigerator: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.” (“The Real Work” from Standing by Words). These words place me squarely in the exquisite company of thinkers throughout time and space who marvel at the world and wake every day to throw ourselves into wholeheartedly mucking about as participants within it, until the day when we don’t wake and we join you and the others who have passed on before us, leaving our own tiny legacies of lands and relationships tended.

In revisiting your work over these past couple of days, I came back across this quote which feels so apropos for our current moment: “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.” (from Life is a Miracle). Over the years since I first discovered your writings, my own life has marched more steadily toward the life of a machine. I now spend long days in front of a screen and often lose track of the fact that I am an alive creature who is inhabiting a body which is not a machine but nevertheless is at its happiest when it is put to satisfying use. I cannot believe you managed to make it this long and not use a computer or a smart phone. Good on you—these things suck your soul.  

Thank you for patiently inviting us to slow down and stretch out in the open spaces of your words, to unplug and experience the visceral pleasures of outdoor physical work, and to consider better solutions for how we would like to interact with each other and the land moving forward.

Thank you also for cheekily reminding us where to look for those solutions: “Solutions have perhaps the most furtive habits of any creatures; they reveal themselves very hesitantly in artificial light, and never enter air-conditioned rooms.” (“Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest” from The Gift of Good Land).

With deep gratitude,

Casey