on fits, starts, and short reaches.

John from Common-place has read The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and offers a worthy reflection, in which he shares his family's beautiful history in his Texan corner of the world. He shares his struggle:

My wife and I have lived for 21 years in a now-101 year-old house. We are but its 3rd owners. Her parents home, purchased in 1950, lies across the garden patch. Her brother owns it now, and her niece lives there, while the other brother lives next door. The sister, before her death, lived at the end of the block. Various aunts and cousins have and do live in other houses scattered around the neighborhood, a near family compound. In fact, my wife has never lived outside this 2-block neighborhood. Except for 3 years in Austin, I have lived my entire life in the southwestern quadrant of our county. My son, my nephew and I are the 5th and 6th-generation owners of our farm, which we simply refer to as "the old place." My folks purchased the new farm, closer by, in 1962. Even the building where our little Orthodox mission meets is in the old schoolhouse associated with my mother's family. Sometimes, after liturgy, I step across the road to the cemetery, and visit with my parents, where 6 generations of my family lie buried. My wife's family and my maternal family had been scratching around on this little patch of earth since the mid 1840s. And the fact that we are 3rd cousins attests to the fact that there is a good bit of overlap in our family stories. All this is to say that the two of us are not exactly poster children for the mobile society.

Certainly our situation is hardly typical in today's society. I am thankful to be able to live out my life in a particular place that has meaning to me. I am sympathetic to the story of Ebenezer Le Page, and yet...I also realize how much a product of the modern world I am. I could have never been content with staying-put as he did. My yearning to travel is a reflection of this, I suppose. Also my familial connectedness is not so much with the close-at-hand ancestral ties, but rather with my dad's family, the "other" which was lost. He was not from around here, as they say. During the Great Depression, he found his way here, settled in, and took charge. Without him, no "old farm" would have been saved, or anything else for that matter. So, I appreciate the rootedness I do have. But reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, reminds me how far I actually am from that life. At best, I may just be trying to have the best of both worlds, which is seldom convincing. It certainly lacks the honesty of a life lived like Ebenezer Le Page.

Andrea Elizabeth shared a similar thought regarding Wendell Berry of late:

As I watch old homestead ranches around me getting bought up by commercial businesses and packed housing developments, as Americans have been doing for a few generations, well it’s what Americans have always done, ask the Indians, I wish more people would do as Mr. Berry in living within his means and respecting creation at his family homestead as the article describes.

I love this part of his poem, I am at home. Don’t come with me.You stay home too.

While I agree with and admire his ethics, I haven’t been able to become an ardent disciple because I don’t think his particular way of life is completely practical for everyone. I love self-sufficiency, but not everyone is as smart as he is. Did he make most of his livelihood on his farm or by his gifted writing? I’ve talked about how much more fertile and better watered Kentucky is compared to where I live too. Still, I could probably get by with the produce available at our Farmer’s Market. Wait, last time I was there I noticed that most things weren’t local. But if I spent a lot of time studying, I could probably find enough local sources to keep us well-fed. But my attentions are usually diverted elsewhere. I resent the hour and a half I spend at Walmart every week as it is. And my home garden, which I prefer to access rather than going across town to the farmer’s market, I’m self-sufficient that way, got mostly eaten by bugs, or didn’t produce much (for the needs of a family of 8 ) for other unknown reasons. I intend on getting better at gardening though. It is a healthy sport.

This weekend past we spent time with our best friends, on their third attempt at a sustainable farm. They have all the skills and the desire to farm, but did not inherit any land, or any significant means, and they have not followed the most common path of niche farming today - to spend a few decades in a lucrative field and then, after accumulating means, running off to the boutique farm. It is likely that this third attempt will be their last, that most of their lives will be spent as serious gardeners, and not as farmers. There is a place for the mourning over lost dreams, but then one must go on and do the hard work in the real here and the real now that God presents to us.

I have written before, and I think honesty requires us of agrarian bents to say it again and again - Wendell Berry inherited the family farm, one that was semi-functional. He had financial means outside of farming, whether or not he needed such. What of those of us who did not inherit such things, and would never have access to such means? These facts are one reason why I must read Berry and Edwards (who wrote Ebenezer) as, first and foremost, eulogists.

But we can learn many important things from these eulogies. We can remember many important things. We are offered in them something of an image of repentance, if we look with our eyes open enough. And we can make our little, sputtering, seemingly inconsequential efforts at the human things. I live in a cheap ranch house on half an acre, but I can double dig a small garden, and I can make things with my hands as time permits, I can cook my own food from as honest of ingredients as I am able to secure. I can read lasting words, sing hymns, sit still. I can attempt to pace my life in a manner that bows as little as possible to the rush of the constant movement of consumption. I can remember that I have failed, and I will fail, and that I am small, that my efforts will matter little but somewhere in that littleness is my salvation, and as God wills the salvation of my children. One can still strive, even in this place, to cultivate the quiet, the slow, to choreograph the movement of one's hands and breath in the dance of activity and stillness in a manner that befits a human life - as best as one is able, in the midst of all those troublesome cares and demands. To borrow my oft put example - even the single mother living in one of those awful bauhuas projects can bake her own bread, and while that may be the only careful human act she has time for, aside from prayer, it is the sort of rebuke of consumenivorism that reveals a clinging to life, and grants a reward, the richness one experiences when coming upon the flower in the desert.

There is also the temptation, the very American temptation, of taking from Berry & Co. a moralist perfectionism. An all or nothing disposition which rots the soul, as it judges any effort which does not achieve a fast and secure perfection to be hell-fodder. There is a lack of pause with this sort of perfectionism, scarce disposition to cover the sins of others, few allowances, a poverty with regard to tenderness of heart. We have to live the life that we are given, and when we read Berry as moralist only, or moralist primarily, most of us end up under a load of impossible moral burdens. I will never get to the farm in KY. I have no way of getting there. I must concern myself with my own home, as Berry exhorts. In much of Berry's literature there is that call to be who you are where you are, in as human a manner possible, but the overt moralism in much of his work provides something of a contradiction in tone at times, and one is best to follow Andrea Elizabeth's reading and take this with a grain of salt. There is not going to be a Wendell Berry movement that changes America. You are not going to take part in some great motion of social change by getting your produce from a local farmer or growing one quarter of your caloric intake. This is not to say that such social movements do not exist and will not push and pull society in this and that way. It is to say that such an agenda betrays Berry and the whole notion of living an honest human life. Movement agendas are destructive abstractions. It is better to simply and quietly go about doing the best things one is able. There will always be the temptation to fight the Dark Lord of Mordor with his own Black Speech. Our focus must be upon the goodness of a row of okra where and when we find it, the goodness of the chicken in the backyard, the goodness of a pig allowed to run about, the goodness of grain and water getting under fingernails. These things are miracles always and only in their instances. As soon as we make of them a rule or a paradigm they are lost to us. God only ever loves this bruised reed, the one here, that you see trampled in front of you. The Society for the Protection of Bruised Reeds (S.P.B.R.) is not the work of angels, but a diversion. The poor in spirit hold up those reeds within their very short reach. And yet that greatest of miracles - the seemingly smallest reach that is the summit of all human affairs, of all human history, that short length from pierced torso to nailed hand, holds the entire universe in its mercied place. Today, right now, this world is kept on its rotational axis for the prayer of a little old nun, chanting O Heavenly King as she presses a cucumber seed into earth with her nub of a finger. There is no other way.