Practice
Resurrection
“So,
friends, everyday do something that won't compute...Give your
approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have
no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build up
under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful even though
you have considered all the facts...Practice resurrection.”
Wendell
Berry (The Country of Marriage)
The first garden I
remember helping my daddy plant was in Morganton, NC, when I was nine
years old. We lived in a newly-built, four-room house on a bald of
red clay. He wanted a garden, but the soil was the sort used to make
bricks and flower pots. So beginning just before Easter, he gave me
the task of hauling buckets of leaf-mold—humus, as Mr. Berry calls
it—from some nearby woods to the garden plot he roped off with
surveyor's line tape. Four buckets a day, no less. I carried my
galvanized bucket across several people's back yards, and into the
quiet woods to scrape up rich black mulch with my bare hands. It smelled
of wet decay, had earthworms in it, and sometimes, grubs, which had
to be picked out and left in the woods. I got absolutely filthy, and
it made me sneeze, but I knew better than to complain. I filled that
plot up with leaf mold. Daddy hacked up the red clay with a pick ax,
and worked the black soil in until they blended together, and that
garden produced as though it had always been there. Green beans and
tomatoes, spring onions and yellow squash. I have faith in humus.
Every day is a lesson in
faith, isn't it? World events swirl around us, but if we hold on to
our faith in the essential goodness of creation, we remain calm in
the midst of the storm. There will always be things that don't
compute, conditions we do not understand, and questions with no
answers. If we let them, they will strip all the joy from life. Find
what you deeply trust, and hold fast to it. I promise, it will grow
corn for you.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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