Reflections on Wendell Berry’s life and words
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” - Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture
When I was in high school, my dad wrote an essay about pirates and farmers. It was used as a metaphor for dating, and it was FedEx’d to every boy I ever dated or went to a high school dance with (to my delight, as you can imagine). When Isaac and I dated, the tables turned, however, and the message was, “Don’t break his heart.” They cared that I too was not a pirate.
A few years after Isaac and I married, I came across a similar concept in the writings of Wendell Berry. When reading Berry’s works, I often felt as though I was a water spider, gliding across the surface of his meaning. I could see the depths of it; it was beautiful, and I also knew I could never quite reach the bottom. While he was prolific and there are many works to praise, there was a concept I simply never got over: the exploiter and the nurturer. I found my life woefully in the camp of the first with a longing to be in the second.
“The terms exploitation and nurture, on the other hand, describe a division not only between persons but also within persons. We are all to some extent the products of an exploitative society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp. “ - Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture
As a daughter of generational dairy farmers with a deep affection for my family’s land, I could easily slip into the sense of place and need to love that place well that Berry argued was essential. And I also grieved the impact of exploitative agrarian farming. Isaac and I were from farms not mildly impacted by the need for yields and outputs.
“The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s.” - Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture
In 2016, I had the privilege to see Wendell Berry’s vision lived out in one of our partner farms, Parker Creek Ranch. Travis and Mandy were raising their boys on generational land. They were seventh-generation ranchers, raising the eighth generation, loving their land, tending it well. It was such a different picture. They also knew the limits of their land and, in the years of severe drought that would soon follow, sent their herds to greener pastures and let their land heal. They are still doing that, waiting for the water to return. They are nurturers.
“The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible.” - Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture
Wendell Berry was clear about the massive cost of the post-agrarian society that we are in. He grieved it; he warned us against it. But he was realistic in his solution. He believed that to own a garden, to do it organically, to connect by any means with a bit of earth, to tend it and to love it, was enough to remind us of our need for one another and for the land we’ve forgotten.
“...I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.” Wendell Berry, Think Little
On my bedside table sits The Farm, a beautiful poem by Berry that walks through the seasons on a farm. It is cherished because it was a gift from my husband and because it is so deliciously and visually potent; in just a line I am plunged into the vision. I am there. It is also prayer for generational land I hope to someday have and to pass along to our kids. Not land assessed for its output and yield, but land that is sacred and loved and cherished so they can do the same.
Isaac and I have done our best to live life as nurturers, treading lightly, loving deeply, supporting those who are leaving the earth better than they found it. We have seen FOND as our own little farm, our plot of land to work hard at and to love well, not just for its outputs but for its intrinsic value and worth. Thank you so much for partnering with us. Thank you for being a nurturer.
And should you desire to live life more like Wendell Berry, he would have one request of you: grow a garden. Love it. Grieve when it dies, rejoice when it springs to life again.
Fondly,
Alysa
