Please Answer All Questions In the Name of Patriotism and the Flag

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Questionnaire

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

Wendell Berry





Take heart. Stay strong. 

Read this.

Be in the 3.5%.

#RESIST

Nepal

His voice is licked
but his dreams
are the artillery of words loaded
to uncoil our strength.

Michel-Ange Hyppolite (Haitian poet)

I'm not much of a "prayer," but my heart aches for the people of Nepal, and I send them prayers from that ache.  Seeing ancient buildings reduced to piles of sticks, enormous sacred statues tumbled, ashy faces under rubble, the bloodied, torn pants of a woman being carried by others makes us feel wildly helpless.

That compulsion to write what we see. That compulsion to not sully with words what is beyond them.




The Real Work

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 come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

A Woman Crude As Any

I took a walk today and looked at Icelandic* poppies sprinkled everywhere, some still with fuzzy heads bowed and others with papery petals in sorbet colors open to the sky. I don't know why it's so hard to get up and out of my pajamas every morning these days, to shake out and up my mind and body. Everything points to the natural world, to air and sky and flower and tree as remedy for what ails the spirit, but I can't say that I'm even remotely disciplined when it comes to acknowledging it.



A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

-Wendell Berry

*A friend pointed out that these are probably Icelandic, not California poppies, so if you read an earlier version, I stand corrected! 

The Yellow Tree

I always forget the name of the tree in my front yard. It goes through a number of iterations every year, remaining a traditional green for about six months during which it also sprouts lush yellow blossoms then these orangey/red dry petal-like pods, then the yellow leaves that you see here, that gradually drop off and litter our front yard and then, finally, stands bare-limbed for a few months until late April or so when it all starts again.

I don't know what I want to say here, other than the tree marks time in an odd way. Everything changes, and everything changes dramatically, but nothing changes, really. I always think of Sophie when I see this tree during its yellow time. I think of how everything is always changing for her and sometimes even dramatically but how everything, too, is always the same. This is not a qualified statement, something that I believe is good or bad or sad or happy. The older I get, the more I let the qualifier things go. This, too, has nothing to do with good or bad, being faithful or lacking faith, wisdom or stupidity. This is a tree.

This morning, Sophie had another seizure that she recovered from quite quickly, except for her foot. Then she recovered from that, again.  She went to school, and I sat on her bed and sat with myself, really. If you can feel a myriad of feelings and think a million thoughts -- leaf green, flowery yellow, pod-like pink, green-veined yellow, brown-bare and dead on the ground -- then you know what I mean. I felt despair, to tell you the truth, or what feels like despair in the guise of dissociation or supreme weariness. I realized, this morning, and a bit the other day when I wrote the 22 maybes post, that I am less traumatized by the actual thing (the seizure, the paralysis, the constipation, the impacted bowel, the poopy diaper) than I am by the tail, made up of those things, that I've dragged for twenty years, that I'll probably keep dragging with me for as long as Sophie and I are alive.

Yes, traumatized and sometimes overcome. So, I sat there for a while, and then I called my father for a pep talk. I got off the phone laughing.

I'm not too good at extending a metaphor, but think tree -- green, yellow, orangey-red, yellow, brown and back to green. Think of a tail, perhaps a dragon's, its scales green, yellow, orangey-red, yellow, brown and back to green. Another day, another year, behind, today, tomorrow.

I go among trees and sit still

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
Around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
Where I left them, asleep like cattle…

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
And the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Wendell Berry

Succor

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Wendell Berry

One forgets about parenting -- the on and on-ness of it.

The Dowager Countess, Downton Abbey 

Friday Surf Report - Things I Like

via ilind.net

• Interesting viewing and reading here about how not giving a sh#@$ can really help you a lot.

• My new favorite blog.

Das Puppendorf

• This separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the fringe, no aberration, but a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geologic fault. And this rift in the mentality of religion continues to characterize the modern mind, no matter how secular or worldly it becomes.

           -- from Wendell Berry's The Body and the Earth

• This blogger has written my heart: Valuable Lives

On being contrary

Icelandic Farm - photo by MaxFarrar

The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,
in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught
so often laughing at funerals, that was because
I knew the dead were already slipping away,
preparing a comeback, and can I help it?
And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed
my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom
had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not
be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me,
and I stood still, and while they stood
quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself
in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray
into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.
When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’
I told them, ‘He's dead.’ And when they told me
‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing ever day
in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’
When they asked me would I like to contribute
I said no, and when they had collected
more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.
When they asked me to join them I wouldn't,
and then went off by myself and did more
than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
‘go and organize the International Brotherhood 
of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.
Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way.

-- Wendell Berry

Listen to it HERE.

Poetry for the New Year

Manifesto:

The Mad Farmer Liberation Front***

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

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.

-- Wendell Berry

***thanks to the potwatcher for turning me on to this poem, along with numerous delicious recipes

Angels

To Know the Dark

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.

- Wendell Berry
  1970

I'm over at Hopeful Parents today.