Stories

I rarely go back to the US but when I do it's often the case that I can't follow the conversations people are having around me because they are about television. Reading Wendell Berry's latest work for The Atlantic I found an eloquent description of my unprocessed response to that awkward social situation.

Reading his work I realize that the disinterest I have for TV and pop culture stems from a deep rooted existential lack that I feel for the modern developed world. As he says in his article "When people begin to replace stories from local memory with stories from television screens, another vital part of life is lost."

Being lucky enough to live in a relatively in-tact rural community while growing up Wendell Berry still got to know the importance of story, which has shaped how he sees the world. "I have my own memories of the survival in a small rural community of its own stories. By telling and retelling those stories, people told themselves who they were, where they were, and what they had done. They thus maintained in ordinary conversation their own living history."

Have we sold our meaning as people and communities? Now we welcome our collective meaning to be designed by TV producers and advertising agencies.

Perhaps it is time to welcome local story back into our lives.

Read Wendell Berry's latest work for The Atlantic:

http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/farmland-without-farmers/388282/

Rules for a Sustainable Community

Since Wendell Berry has opted out of the computer age in favor of a simple life it is up to us bloggers to do what we can with his deep wisdom here in the blogosphere.

Here are his 17 rules for a sustainable community. May it inspire us to get up and walk away from our computers, into the forests and fields.


1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbours.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products – first to nearby cities, then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labour saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.

12. See that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no institutionalised childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalised. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programmes, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighbourly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighbourhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.

Get the poster from YES http://store.yesmagazine.org/other-products/17-rules-for-sustainable-community-poster

The Joys and Lessons of Failed Work

Listening to a talk from the San Francicso Zen Center last night on failure I contemplated all my own failures and how much space and opportunity was in them.

I could not be more thankful for the failing and the realization they provide: that I can relax into comfortable happy Lucky Idiot-hood and smile.

Failure in good company:


The Joys and Lessons of Failed Work by Wendell Berry

I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.
And I think of all the effort
I have wasted and all the time,
and of how much joy I took
in that failed work and how much
it taught me. For in so failing
I learned something of my place,
something of myself, and now
I welcome back the trees.

What Are People For?

For the last few weeks I have been reading and re-reading a 2000 collection of essays by Wendell Berry titled: What are People For?;  I read it to visitors who come for the coffee and wild food; I read it between classes and chapters of Fukuoka and Rushdie; I cannot stop reading.

Wendell Berry is an extremely well spoken and pissed off farmer living in rural Kentucky and writing about the state of things from the small scale farmer's perspective.  In this book he addresses everything from the industrialization of sex to the agricultural policies in the US which have driven migration of rural people to urban areas. He shows a number of fantastic examples of what a good life looks like and he questions some of our deep seated assumptions about life in the 21st century.

Reading this work I find myself drawn to the fields and the woods. I spend more time planting and harvesting than I do reading or preparing for classes.

Several of Wendell Berry's essays are available to read online from North Glen. The good people at Powell's Books In Portland Oregon have written a synopsis of the work and have copies available.The reviews are a fun read here too. Interscience has posted a brief response to the title essay What Are People For?.  Brtom has some links and an interesting response to Wendell Berry's controversial article 'Why I am not going to by a Computer'. Berry's follow up to this essay is Sales Resistance.

Shirley Nicklin's award winning photo Maturity and a poem by Wendell Berry.