Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

In real life: Thanksgiving, hours on the highway at the wheel through the maples ablaze with colour. Discussions of farms, looking for land, almost finishing the Driftwood and diving into music... Getting scared at the prospect of getting what I want. Getting scared at the prospect of not. But always walking away full of love and planning...

I have been thinking about our role as humans here. We conduct and shepherd the forces of life into a union on the farm... all the beings rotating around the fertility of the soil, the energy of the sun and the carrier of the water. The animals both wild and domestic, the grasses and the grain, the vegetables and the woods... and then us. And what makes us different? Music and fire. Hands and stories.


...


Since awakening to the life of the farm this Spring and learning its rhythms, I have discovered poetry.


"In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie--
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrickles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning." -T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets


...


"There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair--done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.

Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much...

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces it with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose lonliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other's arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments...

To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure..."

-Wendell Berry, What Are People For?