A Place to Grow (Now and through Eternity)

Preface: Some have called me a “Gentleman Farmer”-a title for which I am proud.

The Man Born to Farming

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout

to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

Descending in the dark?

from Farming: A Handbook, 1970

            -Wendell Berry

I continue to be inspired by Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934), who is an American farmer, poet, novelist, essayist, environmental activist, and cultural critic.

In Genesis 3:19 (King James version), the Biblical text reads:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Modern Science teaches us that at the atomic level, all life is made up of the same ingredients.

Both of my grandfathers (Ernest Woliver and Ulis Justice) were railroaders by profession and farmers by necessity.  Their grandfathers, and generations of grandfathers before them, worked in the soil to provide food for their families.  It is only during my generation that most Americans acquire their food by purchasing it from a merchant.

So let’s dig down into this subject.

The Man Born to Farming, The Grower of Trees…

Chestnut tree planted in memory of Robbie

the gardener…

the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout

to him the soil is a divine drug.

He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing.

He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap…

The dung heap at Merry Mount

 and rise again in the corn.  

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

Like a vine clinging in the sunlight…

and like water

Descending in the dark?

So when I reach down and grab a handful of Merry Mount dirt, what  (in addition to a couple of earthworms and their secretion) do I hold in the palm of my hand: particles from the universe; dust from the Evening Star; a bit of my mother’s grandmother’s grandmother; a remnant of Walt Whitman’s beard hair; an inkling of the rose a brave placed behind the ear of his beloved?

The Current

Having once put his hand into the ground,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,
a man has made a marriage with his place,
and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.
His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.
It has reached into the dark like a root
and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness.
a flickering sap coursing upward into his head
so that he sees the old tribespeople bend
in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening
to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,
their lodges and graves, and closing again.
He is made their descendant, what they left
in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.
And he sees the hearers of his own blood arriving,
the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,
their hands gathering the stones up into walls,
and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground
to lie still under the black wheels of machines.
The current flowing to him through the earth
flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,
a young man who has reached into the ground,
his hand held in the dark as by a hand.

  -Wendell Berry

I feel grounded.

CPW