For Christmas this past year Caitlin gave me a book of poetry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, and slowly I have been digesting its pages. It is one of those books where I began marking the poems I found meaningful and had to stop myself from putting a sticky note on every page! Wendell Berry is a novelist and poet, and by practice, a lover of land and place. By which I mean that he lives on his family farm in Kentucky and believes that begin committed to a place and knowing it deeply informs the kind of person we become. Our connection to the earth and its rhythms of life and death matter for our humanity.
Just before our Season of Creation began, I read the poem "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," which has stuck with me these last few weeks. Below is an excerpt from the poem:
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. 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 the 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...
Practice resurrection.
The entire poem is provocative (I commend it to you here) and it continues to interrupt the pace of my schedule like a splinter working its way from a wound. Certainly, it is counter to my general daily focus to consider my actions along the timescale of sequoias whose lives span millennia. And with our focus on preserving and lengthening life, it feels almost anti-America to embrace death and decay as a sign of life to come. The ending line, "to practice resurrection," is one which leaves little room for inaction. Resurrection only happens in places of death, in the rot that brings forth new life in the soil. This mad farmer invites us not to abandon these places, but draw close to them, listen and learn from them, and participate in the transformation they offer. How else should we as Christians—a resurrection people—to live out our days in this world?