Sunday, May 16, 2010

Whether Farming or Faithing, the Field is Local

In a recent essay, poet-farmer Wendell Berry reflects on the influence of place not only on his farming but on his writing.  He could just as well have added "on his being."  In so reflecting he manages, unintentionally to be sure, to offer perhaps one of the best explanations of the spirituality of terroir I could hope to find.  Noting what he calls the "difficulty and the discipline of locality," he goes on to ruminate about the particularities of farming an "actual place."  Recalling an earlier essayist who had influenced him, he quoted him observing..."the problem on any two hundred acres is never the same:  the richness of the soil, its qualities, the neighborhood, the distance from the market, the climate, the water, and a thousand such things make the life on every farm distinctly individual.

For Berry, that recognition "sets forth the challenge, not only to all forms of industrial land use, but to all other approaches to land use, including agrarianism, that are abstract.  The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.  Farming becomes a high art when farmers know and respect in their work the distinct individuality of their place and the neighborhood of creatures that lives there.  This has nothing to do with the set of personal excuses we call 'individualism' but is akin to the holy charity of the Gospels and the political courtesy of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of rights.  Such practical respect is the true discipline of farming, and the farmer must maintain it through the muddles, mistakes, disappointments, and the frustrations, as well as the satisfactions and exultations, of every actual year on an actual farm" (Imagination in Place, 2010).

Exchange the word "church" for "farm" and you pretty much get the point.

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