Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.
Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator’s love for it.
The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.
The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
A tree forms itself in answerto its place and the light.Explain it how you will, the onlything explainable will beyour explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.
Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.
The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.
The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.
The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
The significance – and ultimately the quality – of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.
…the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.
It is to be broken. It is to betorn open. It is not to bereached and come to rest inever. I turn against you,I break from you, I turn to you.We hurt, and are hurt,and have each other for healing.It is healing. It is never whole.
Marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. (from “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”)
There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.
People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.
Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.
She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry.
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
Oh Lord, make us ableTo eat all that’s on this table,And if there’s some we haven’t gotBring it to us while it’s hot
And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we “know” that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.(pg.99, “The Body and the Earth”)
When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird.When I falllet me fall without regretlike a leaf.
And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.
The crisis of community has its source in the corruption of character.
There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.
I believe that the community – in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures – is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)
What is the point of “labor saving” if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93)
Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)
…a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one’s bodily life.
…make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.” Wendell Berry
The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)
Respect, I think, always implies imagination – the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.
This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.
Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.
For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father’s dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.
The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)
I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.
I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn’t want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his life. He didn’t want his death to be the end of a technological process.
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.
Time doesn’t stop. Your life doesn’t stop and wait until you get ready to start living it.
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief… For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.