Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. – Wendell Berry This past week was full of work at the root layer, away from the tactics of day to day tending. We took walks. We made big posters of our observations. We studied beaver dams. We planted a tree. We […]
This week I am taking a trip Far Away, for the first time in quite a while. I remember now how much I love that moment when the plane lifts above the clouds, up where it is always sunny. I remember what a delight it is to splash my face with water after a […]
Oh, dear friends, what a time. This week I set up a home office and argued with a lady in CVS who was taking the whole shelf of hand sanitizer and watched the stock market plummet and read so many scary headlines and it was all perseverance and planning and analysis and determination and fine, […]
This week brought the joy of being with family, and the satisfaction of some worthy work being done, and then some sharp sorrowful news from far away. It can be a terribly helpless feeling, caring from a distance – but in the midst of the floaty useless anxiety, I got to be near this amazing […]
“Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” – Wendell Berry Some days. Some weeks. Some months… are doozies. This past week alone, reeling from more news of violence – against one another, against our home planet, against ourselves – there was the awfulness of the loss of Toni Morrison, and […]
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. – Wendell Berry I’ve been spending time lately in some circles where it’s cool to be cynical, clever to be critical. If you dare to raise a note of optimism in this crowd, you risk being branded a simpleton. Oblivious […]
Eternal in its passing… I am spending this post-Thanksgiving dawn with Wendell Berry, via the newly published Art of Loading Brush. As always, there is a sense of stillness when reading Berry’s words, which is not to be confused with a sense of complacency, or even peace. It’s the kind of stillness that comes […]
If you’re asking a question with an answer, chances are you’re asking the wrong question. This plus many other insights were part of the exchange between Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Mary Berry at this year’s Schumacher Lecture, part of the terrific Schumacher Center for a New Economics. If you are interested in how to […]
“We have to undertake a different kind of accounting, more exacting if less exact… We participate in our little human economy to a considerable extent by factual knowledge, calculation, and manipulation; our participation in the Great Economy also requires those things, but requires as well humility, sympathy, forbearance, generosity, and imagination.” —Wendell Berry Counting Versus […]
“Live in the layers – not on the litter.” I was fortunate to attend the Slow Money National Gathering in Boulder earlier this month, and though far from my own home, I was struck by the over-arching and overwhelming theme (and sense) of homecoming.