"Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places."
-- Wendell Berry
"So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it."
Have a good rest, Mr. Berry.
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
-Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry's essay "Damage" is one of the most important things in shaping my perspective on the world I'll ever read. He describes how an effort to create a man-made pond in a field where he wanted to graze cattle worked, for a time, and then collapsed, causing irreparable damage to the land and resulting in making the field unusable. It's a brilliant illustration of unforeseen consequences, and of how wielding power can lead us to places we could not, under any circumstances, have anticipated. And it was a very typical perspective from Berry, who had a profound sense of the way hubris and love of power were our era's besetting sins.
Wendell Berry was often accused of offering no solutions to the problems he pointed out in his work. There was a time I thought this too. The more I read him I understood his solution is to change our way of thinking to value God, people, family, community & land more than money.
Of all the dumb things I do, none are worse than giving my money to @HomeDepot. Absolutely love the attitude that I should be grateful and fortunate to give them my money.