Vision & Philosophy

I keep waiting to be ready. Put that first, because it's under everything else. I've been living as if a day is coming when I'll be finished — land bought, water secured, the pantry full, the man complete — and only then does the real life start. Broke as I am, scattered as I am, I've been grading every day against that finish line. And every night I lose, because the finish line isn't there. Nobody gets to be ready. I wrote that once and thought I understood it. I thought it

Before the stone did know its name The Word did move, it had no frame No hand as yet had made it still No wall had learned to hold its will Then down it fell as waters fall Not sin, but weight, and but a call And matter closed her hand so tight And named the fist a throne of light A hand did reach and touch the stone It carved a mark upon the bone Yet never knew what it had caught Was never his, and never bought But Sophia stayed beneath the flood She moved as root beneath th

I came home from two weeks on the road with almost nothing left, and one night, alone, something happened to my seeing. I loved my senses that night. I mean that plainly — the way the air sat in the room, the weight of my own hands, the sounds a house makes when nobody else is in it. I loved them and I did not trust them. Both at once. The old suspicion was awake in me, the one the Gnostics wrote down eighteen centuries ago: that the senses are the furniture of a false world.

The Essence of Farming Farming gave birth to civilization. And depending on how we farm, it can give birth to new ones. We carry a much bigger and older role in nature than we do in civilization. For most of human history, our relationship with the land wasn't a lifestyle choice — it was the source of meaning, rhythm, and identity. It was the job no one could take away. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that. The Illness of Civilization Civilization is sick. Not metaphorical