"There is an inescapable kinship between farming and art, for farming depends as much on character, devotion, imagination, and the sense of structure, as on knowledge. It is a practical art.
But it is also a practical religion, a practice of religion, a rite. By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter, light, and darkness. In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and the bodies of living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of the imagination. How long this cycling of energy will continue we do not know; it will have to end, at least here on this planet, sometime within the remaining life of the sun. But by aligning ourselves with it here, in our little time within the unimaginable time of the sun's burning, we touch infinity; we align ourselves with the universal law that brought the cycles into being and that will survive them."
Wendell Berry "The Use of Energy" from "The Unsettling of America"
But it is also a practical religion, a practice of religion, a rite. By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter, light, and darkness. In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and the bodies of living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of the imagination. How long this cycling of energy will continue we do not know; it will have to end, at least here on this planet, sometime within the remaining life of the sun. But by aligning ourselves with it here, in our little time within the unimaginable time of the sun's burning, we touch infinity; we align ourselves with the universal law that brought the cycles into being and that will survive them."
Wendell Berry "The Use of Energy" from "The Unsettling of America"
This is great. I'm reading this book right now.
ReplyDeleteMe too, obviously! This is a great book. We should make it part of the reading list for apprentices.
ReplyDelete