It’s impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
The only sustainable city – and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal – is a city in balance with its countryside.
I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man – so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.
Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.
We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody’s enemy.
Why I am NOT going to buy a computer.
The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.
If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.
When the mind’s an empty room The clear days come.
Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.
That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.
It’s the impeded stream that sings.
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.