The steward of small things

THE LOVELY, WILD SCENT OF RAIN is wafting in the window on a south wind.

Rain. Lots of it. The rainiest year on record. Mosquitoes attack in wispy swarms. Even in full sun! I'm marked with welts, even a couple of kid-like scabs on my ankles (bony spots are usually itchiest).

Scratching insect bites: An ancient summer ritual.

(Just now, a tiny red spider crawls in wavering circles across my screen, searching for a smell, a texture, an object she recognizes. I lose her for a second when I look away but eventually find her on the table. She is escorted to a leaf outside.)

In April, I brought home two native chokecherries, knowing they're beloved by birds. Then I learned that chokecherry's leaves, stems, bark and seeds—every part but its fruit—contain cyanide. Poison to mammals, like my little cat, who is allowed in the back yard. So the seedlings stayed in their containers on my back porch as I fostered them, pondering where their true home should be.

In a wild field not far away, in the sun in an open spot amid the flowering clovers, trefoil, daisies and fleabane, I planted them today. 

I cleared the stones from around their roots, but they're on their own now. My wish is that they send their roots deep into that long-ago prairie soil and thrive, growing fruit for hungry feathered creatures to feast upon, making their home again on lands where they once grew.

Full summer snuck up on me. It was a surprise, like rounding a curve the other day and catching sight of a doe lit by morning sunlight, grazing in grasses high as her back, in the place above the river where the wild turkeys like to strut.

Driving to work. Rounding a curve. Ordinary. But then: heart-singing beauty. 

Like that. 

This moment was shaped like a bowl, as a bowl is shaped like a lake and a lake reflects the sky, and in its it hollow it held a handful of exquisitely ripe raspberries, with raspberry ice cream. Juicy with all that rain, sugared by rare days of hot sun, throbbing with life and summer. 

A body-shivering deliciousness: this is living. 

An overpowering feeling: this is a gift. 

Earth our home, let me thank you for the care you take of me. With such generosity and love you feed us, sustain us, delight us and fill us with joy. 

In reciprocity, I make this offering into your rich, dark, life-giving hands: Two small chokecherries. 

I commend these green spirits to you and place them in your care. 

Make them to flourish upon your breast, let them be part of the unending tale of wonder you tell. 

Of how you provide for all, for free. 

Of how each creature and each growing thing depends on your generosity. 

Of how there is a difference between taking what has been offered and taking what has not. And that the difference begins with gratitude.

With this offering, I give thanks. 

An abundance of gifts come your way.

Towers of bright clouds piled high in a blue sky. 

The glowing red of ripe raspberries, halfway between crimson and rose petal.  

The flashing flight of a blackbird past your window. 

Five bronze bells ringing noon from high on the hill every day—until one day, the chords suddenly cast soft white petals over your heart. 

Midsummer.

It's like this: So many things that matter can't be planned or scheduled. Can't be corralled or orchestrated, dissected or predicted or codified. 

You may just look up, or listen, or sniff the wind, and there it is. 

Freely given.

Please recognize and accept these gifts.

Yes, they're intentional.

They were made for you. 

The love that binds us

Some say we protect that which we love....

...because when we love something, we take it into ourselves, and it somehow becomes part of us, to be sheltered and nurtured and cared for and helped.

Others say what we love will save us...

...because love for other creatures brings meaning and joy into our lives, rescuing us from aloneness in this world.

The works of video art embedded below speak to the oneness that connects life on earth, the love that binds us all in an intricate and ancient web of existence.

And, like love, they are heartbreaking in their beauty. If you do not tear up at least a little while viewing them, you are made of sterner stuff than I....

"The Awakening" is part of a dance, film and photography project for monarch butterfly conservation. I am happy to say they exceeded their initial Kickstarter funding goal a couple of days ago, but I'm sure there will be future opportunities to chip in.

I post it here in honor of the three monarchs I raised last summer.



Moving for Monarchs: The Awakening from Moving for Monarchs on Vimeo.



The "Ashes and Snow" video by Canadian filmmaker Gregory Colbert is described as "a poetic field study that depicts the world not as it is, but as it might be—a world in which the natural and artificial boundaries separating humans from other species do not exist. The viewing experience is one of wonder and contemplation, serenity, and hope."

A consecrated Earth is always the paradise I imagine--a kind of Eden, with humanity's relationship to the all the world's creatures restored--it would look a lot like this stunning film.

Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert from Gregory Colbert on Vimeo.

I don't even want to think about a world without Monarch butterflies, or polar bears, or gray wolves, or elephants, or bees. And yet, to turn a blind eye, to refuse to see what is happening and do nothing is unloving and wrong.

I do not know how it has happened that so many have forgotten that we--humans and all other living things--are all vital characters in an enduring love story old as time. Our well-being and survival are knitted together, blood, breath and bone...encoded in our genes in ways we cannot yet measure, yet that are nonetheless real as the love that binds us.

Popes, planets and politics

Last night, we headed to our local second-run movie theater to watch Elysium, described thusly:

"In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. The people of Earth are desperate to escape the planet's crime and poverty, and they critically need the state-of-the-art medical care available on Elysium -- but some in Elysium will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve their citizens' luxurious lifestyle."

Generally, I avoid films and books that present bleak visions of the earth's future. The premise that humanity and the planet are doomed, that we are fated to be victims of the worst parts of ourselves...this overall seems to encourage us to be powerless and passive in response to this perceived inevitability.

And in that way, it seems to me such creations may enable these grim futures even as they decry them. Surely we can imagine and create a more positive, hopeful scenario for humanity to strive for? What is this unhealthy fascination with violence, cynicism and darkness? (I do believe I've become a Pronoia-ist without even realizing it. I thank Rob Brezsny.)

In any case, the injustices and inequalities portrayed in Elysium are all too real. Money rules in a capitalist society. The government, the economy, our cultural beliefs and values, the way hundreds of millions of us live our lives--all based on a socio-economic system that puts money at the center and marginalizes humans and the earth our home.

Of course we each can try to live and act from different values. But the systems in which we function are themselves based on a fundamentally flawed relationship to the earth and other peoples--the culmination of centuries of conquering, consuming, destroying and discarding.

Not only are lives and our humanity diminished by these impoverished and destructive systems; most horrifying to me is that they are systematically destroying the life of this planet. But it doesn't need to be this way; for thousands upon thousands of years, human societies were human- and earth-centered.

And that is why I am so inspired and moved by Pope Francis's powerful denouncement of our morally bankrupt financial system. Even on the page, his words ring with Truth, compassion and righteousness.

I am not a Catholic, but this is not a matter of religion; it is a matter of that which no religion owns: ethics, morality, compassion, justice. Humanity. In our most positive sense, not our least.

Pope Francis writes:

"Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.....
The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule."

YES to that a thousand times. When righteousness speaks with such a powerful voice, it makes us feel part of something larger, unites us in a joint cause...we have suffered so many losses, yet perhaps all is not lost. Humanity is so close to overthrowing the current paradigm, and we need words like these to lend support and shape our thoughts and actions.

Read the apostolic exhortation in its entirety here.

This, too, came floating across my screen today. The first commandment really encompasses all the rest; but ten makes for a nice symmetry.

Earth's Ten Commandments

1. Thou shalt love and honor the Earth, for it blesses thy life and governs thy survival.

2. Thou shalt keep each day sacred to the Earth and celebrate the turning of its seasons.

3. Thou shalt not hold thyself above other living things nor drive them to extinction.

4. Thou shalt give thanks for thy food to the creatures and plants that nourish thee.

5. Thou shalt limit thy offspring for multitudes of people are a burden unto the Earth.

6. Thou shalt not kill nor waste Earth's riches upon weapons of war.

7. Thou shalt not pursue profit at the Earth's expense, but strive to restore its damaged majesty.

8. Thou shalt not hide from thyself or others the consequences of thy actions upon the Earth.

9. Thou shalt not steal from future generations by impoverishing or poisoning the Earth.

10. Thou shalt consume material goods in moderation so all may share Earth's bounty.


And here is a slightly different version, enhanced by music and visuals of our beautiful planet:

How it falls

ON THE DAY OF THE BEAVER, a day when the winds were calm, I tried paying attention. Maybe for the first time, I saw how maple leaves fall stem-first, spinning around their own axes like golden goblets then landing upright for a moment where grasses are thick.

I paid attention to the course of oak leaves. Burnished and glossy, heavier than maple leaves, they drift through the air on their backs...swinging to and fro like small pendulums marking time.

Deeper into autumn, on a day when the Lords of the Winds gusted mightily, I paid attention as the leaves flew sideways like fleeing birds, driven far from their trees instead of heaped at their roots.

As I lay on my back on a leaf blanket, paying attention, my eye was drawn again and again to this particular oak tree. It was so beautiful, with its speaking contours, the contrast between its bold branchings and bronzed leaves, which flashed like spangles against the sky. Reminding me of the woods through which the Twelve Dancing Princesses progressed on their way to their mysterious nightly revels: a forest with leaves of silver, a second with leaves of gold and finally, closest to the enchanted castle, a wood whose leaves sparkled with diamond dew drops.

The authors whose works I have been reading suggest that that particular tree was speaking to me, which is how it drew my attention; communicating with me in the way of a tree person to a human person. Color is a kind of speech. Sound and movement, as well. They can inform us about weather, season, health of the tree. But is there more to interpret? What else was being communicated?

While I am used to sending feelings (and words) of praise and gratitude to trees, is that is as far as the reciprocity extends? Perhaps the images and associations they spark are more than just my own mind at work...maybe it is more mutual, a kind of conversation between my mind, my intuition and the other beings around me? Co-creating the world?

I am not entirely certain how to receive that which a tree may want to tell. But it likely begins with cultivating a state of openness, and...paying attention.

Priscilla Stuckey in Kissed by a Fox writes, that though the typical American knows how to work or make use of the land, "Far less often do we stop to merely gaze at the land, open-eyed--to watch it, as students, over time....Knowing where we are takes attention. Sustained looking. Seeing. Becoming rooted in the place we live, whether bright desert or blustery mountain, dark woodland or windy shore."

She also writes: "Though many modern people express a longing for lost wildness, what I think we are really missing is personality--the integrity of place. A relationship with the unique piece of Earth where we dwell, an ability to see its deep character."

And: "Among my people, children are taught to read books; among some other peoples, children are taught to read trees."

My musings: For a person who has not been taught to read trees, watching a leaf fall to the ground and noticing the way in which it falls is one small way of paying attention. It is part of learning to be literate about the personality and ways of an oak or a maple, the winds, this particular land, and its non-human inhabitants.

The immediate rewards to paying attention to this other-language: a sense of peacefulness, calm and well-being. A few moments of restfulness from the brain chatter. Slowly I am shifting a small part of my way of being, from interior, ruminative, dichotomous and feeling apart to one more observant, receptive and "part of."

This keeps me feeling young...young, as in, the world fascinates and surprises me. As in, there is more to the world, Horatio, than is dreamt of in my philosophy.

Maybe it is as Mary Oliver wrote, and I did not have ears to hear it until now:

"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,  

the world offers itself to your imagination,  

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- 

over and over announcing your place  in the family of things." 

There are no small adventures

Lately, I've been reading about ambitious adventures into the wild (Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths and The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane).

As well as vicarious experiences, I'm looking for insights. How do others connect with the wild? How do I channel grief at the loss of wild places into healing for the land and for myself? How can I belong to the immensity of nature? Is it possible to penetrate that frustrating barrier between myself and what is outside of myself?

Albert Einstein wrote: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
             
David Abram said, "the deepest impulse in my work...is to renew the experience of being immersed, embedded, in the depths of a living world."

The writers whose work I've been reading seem in their various ways to be seeking a relationship with the wild, in order to find the wild within themselves. (At least, that is one lens through which I read their work.)

Unlike these seekers, I do not climb mountains, drink ayahuasca brewed by Amazonian shamans, or skinnydip in glacial lakes. My adventures are of the micro sort: A red fox or a deer by the river. An indigo bunting foraging in a flash of blue on the edge of a field. A chipmunk zipping between my bicycle wheels. The scent of decaying leaves or oncoming rain or sun-dried sweet grass lifting on a breeze.

Must I journey to the mountain? Is the wild "out there," or hidden in plain sight all around us?

Toward the end of The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane writes,“But I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had once been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these were wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.”

I find myself questing for the same things that these writers quest for, seeking some of the same answers. I welcome them as mentors, guides and companions. Their words, and the words of many of you, keep me company as I wander.

And yet, even the most beautifully written words are only words. Words can revive our longing, articulate our grief, link us back to the landscape with power and magic; but they cannot take the place of immersing our physical selves in that landscape. Just as even the most evocative photograph can offer us one dimension of experience--bereft of sound, or scent, or the touch of the wind on our faces--only an echo of a living, breathing, depthful place.

So, I walk. With appreciation, in gratitude.

This is the adventure outside my door, and I find myself, as N.D. Wilson writes, like an ant trying to assess the cathedrals of Europe. It is more than I am able to encompass.

“We are not exiled from the garden of Eden but living in it still. Paradise is not in the past or future but only in the present, this Earth an untamed heaven, a wild paradise garden.” --Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

“I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.” --Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

Photos taken on the Mississippi River bluffs along West River Parkway.

A pocketful of acorns

You know the way nature documentaries dazzle you with images of bird migrations that seem to span continents, and flickering shoals of synchronized fish, and vast, galloping herds of wild antelopes? How your witnessing heart swells and tries to recalibrate its beat, in an effort to be part of it all, the sheer exuberance of the-earth-our-home? 

Maybe another language has a word made just for this feeling; but in English, one would begin with the word Joy...then add Awe and Wonder and Gratitude, and certainly Love. 

Well. Living in a city, I see only small pieces of that immense sky. Bits of woodlands, patches of prairie, wetlands flanked by highways, lakes reshaped by human agency. No vast spaces teeming with wild creatures. Wildness, yes; no wilderness.

But I do see acorns. 

This, I've decided, is the time of the acorn moon, a fruiting year. In the park-that-used-to-be-oak-savanna, they crunch and roll underfoot, strewn across my path where they tumbled from their parent trees. Acorns wearing rough, prickly caps pulled down low over their smooth hazel faces. Acorn pairs and clusters, cracked-shell acorns, acorns with small holes gnawed by grub or beetle, ghosts of acorns in tannins imprinted on the walkways.

And they lay not in miserly hundreds, but in thousands, hundreds of thousands...mounds. Heaped about in glorious plenitude, grown to propagate and nurture what they will: squirrel, white-tailed deer, duck. Pheasant. Wild turkey, Blue Jay. Woodpecker, mouse, bear. (Plus, pigs; at least in England. Now, if I had a pig....)

Through the metaphoric lens of the acorn, I get a sense of the hugeness of the wild world, its utter and splendid generosity. Nature does not play small. 

If I lived my life on the same grand scale, what would it look like? Because I am itching to open it up, to growgrowgrow. I long to hitch a ride on wildness's back, become one of its children, become one with its daily miracles. They go on all the time, is what I'm saying, whether or not we notice. Right now: miracle! Every moment. It is astonishing how many of them that I have taken for granted, how many nearly all of us take for granted.

Maybe I could have inferred nature's quiet yet immense doings from observing one autumn, or even one acorn; but that is reasoning, and what I am talking about is belonging to this wildness, not being outside of it, because I'm through with that. Finding where it lives in me and singing it back, the wonder song, through the rhythm of my heart, my breath; the dilation of these pupils, prickling of this skin, rushing of blood, the spring of muscle and tendon.

Letting this belonging change me, carry me somewhere deeper, stronger, brighter and darker. Because I get the feeling that I am seeing and feeling only the smallest bit of what is there to be seen and felt.

Now, right now, the bones of the woods and bluffs thrust forth from the withering masses of high summer's green, the way a face angles from youth into age. 

Again and again. The crunch of acorns under my feet. Sweet chirping of crickets singing me to sleep. Young-feathered eagles circling over flowing river and wide grasses in search of rabbits, fishes, voles.

Red-tailed hawks perched on light poles along the highway, the spinning down of summer in the crucible of September and all the millions of things I don't see, but that call me to shake off this worn-out illusion of separation, if I can. To come home to here.

I load up my pocket with acorns for the oak-less squirrels living in our silver maple. We are entering the time of feasting.

What is the world? What is it for? 
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fulfillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. 

--N.D. Wilson

Photos: Caponi Art Park, Eagan, MN. 

To care and care for

Butterfly. Gentle spirit floating on the summer breeze, where are you?

Maybe you have heard about the worldwide collapse of honey bee colonies. One-third of the honey bees in the U.S. have vanished in the past few years--in fact, records show there are sixty percent fewer bee colonies than there were in 1947 in the U.S.

At the outdoor "Pollinator Party" I attended a couple of weeks ago were a number of passionate save-the-bees organizations, back yard beekeepers, the University of Minnesota Bee Squad and more folks, all gathering to learn, educate and hopefully, combat this concerning state of affairs.

Honey bee diving headfirst into a tasty blossom.

And now, the butterflies. I've seen three of them in my yard this summer. Three butterflies! When we were once companioned each summer afternoon by glowing orange wings fluttering, skimming over the grass, tiny black feet gripping flower petals, tongues unfurling to sip the nectar of our yards' daisies, zinnias, bee balm and roses.

Now it is August, Lammas; nearly time for the fragile, winged ones to start again on their long, long journey south, and there are few, so few to even make the trip, to lay their eggs, to overwinter in California and Mexico in glorious, breathing masses on their favorite roosting trees.

The newspaper reports that the monarch population has crashed because of the cold spring. Too cold to fly north, too cold for nectar-bearing plants to bloom when the monarch needed food and the milkweed wasn't big enough for the monarchs to lay their eggs on.

As our remaining wild places--the woodlots, highway ditches, open fields and stream edges--are mowed, treated with chemicals, planted with crops or replaced by concrete and asphalt, there is less and less milkweed and other nectar sources to sustain monarchs on their epic journey from Minnesota to Mexico and back again.


But wait--aren't butterflies and bees indicator species? Yes. And they are dying off by the millions, because we are destroying what they need to survive. And because we are outright killing them with pesticides. A generation of monarchs has been lost. Who notices? Who cares? John Caddy, a wonderful poet-naturalist and teacher living in Minnesota, writes:

A suddenly rare monarch butterfly

honors my yard.

Last year dozens, this year three.

All the big butterflies 

are suddenly--BANG--gone

Generations of butterflies,

swallowtails, fritillaries,

monarchs, admirals gone,

slaughtered by genetically modified 

Roundup-Ready corn.

But we will have corn syrup for our obesity

and we’ll have ethanol for our cars,

while Monsanto stockholders

grin above their jowls

and our children lose the magic

bequeathed them by the Earth

ever since human eyes opened. 

Their eyes will be less bright

and they will not know it.

from Morning Earth Daily Healing Images, August 2, 2013

Let me state here: I Care.

You care, otherwise you wouldn't be reading a web journal called Wildspell in the first place, and writing your own wild blogs...and I need and have to believe that there are many of us out there, and that we are each doing something about this planetary crisis in our own back yards.

We are writing our legislators, asking our stores to take these insecticides off the shelves.

We are unleashing our most powerful words to sound the alarm, we are painting visions inspired by our love and concern, conjuring up spells of protection, planting milkweed pods by the bucketful, nurturing what needs nurturing inside and out.

Restoring prairies, building brush piles to shelter beetles, learning about our native birds and wildflowers, breathing and feeling gratitude and blessing the earth every day. Falling under the enchantment of bluebells.

Praying, even if we don't believe in a god or goddess, that a shift is coming, a way of living on this beautiful planet that sustains it instead of destroys it.

During my daily life, I keep encountering these words written by Wendell Berry, and I wonder, is this it? I think, yes. This is what the world wants to happen, this is what The Team wants to happen, what so many loving and compassionate, connected and sane, tree-hugging-river-honoring people want to happen, and maybe it is time. Finally, it is time:

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it." (Full quote here.)

Let me tell you, I am afraid. Frustrated, furious, stricken with grief. As I consider these losses I feel, in the apocryphal words of Chief Seattle, a great loneliness of spirit. What are we doing? How can I get off this ride, this society that I was born to? How can I stop harming and start healing that which I most love?

The loss of our fellow creatures is the keenest of all humanity's many losses, and I mourn them continually, with every breath, at a level so deep I can't name it. I think we all do, we can't help but do--they are part of us, the bright and shining ones, they fill our hearts with joy and wonder, they are our only blood companions on this earth, our relatives; our dearest treasures, surely?

I try to turn toward hope, for fear I will be mired in endless grief, unable to act or mend or change anything. Gary Snyder says, “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.” “You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency,” says Wendell Berry, “and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.... you’re going to have to humble yourself to be willing to do it one little bit at a time."

He also says, “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”

I went in search of monarch butterflies at Longfellow Gardens. I strolled around each garden plot: vanilla-scented heliotrope, sweet cigarette tubes of nicotiana, nose-itching echinacea, the cider-vinegar of rich compost...found beauty, but no butterflies.

And I understood something: how sterile, pointless and empty a garden feels without butterflies and bees and hummingbirds beguiling our eyes, gathering food, supporting life on this planet.

I picked my way through the sunny meadow: musty-lemon scent of bergamot, sweet anise weeds, flutter of white moths...but no butterflies.

Finally, a flash of sun on orange wings led me a merry chase up and down paths, to the wild-spilling edges of the lawns where native thistles, bergamot and prairie coneflowers sprang purple, lavender and softbright yellow. There, on the edges, she finally settled to breathe for a moment, display her wings, playing the coy celebrity to my dogged paparazza.

I spoke to her, thanked her, wished her well with all the power of good wishing in me, the lone butterfly.

Tonight, I'm learning a little about how to raise monarchs. I will tend to them and nurture them in my best mama manner, so they can be tagged and released at my neighborhood's annual Monarch Festival in early September.

This is something I can do.

We are on a mission, my friend. For you, I share these words, which combine an affirmation, a call to action and a flickering brightness among the clouds...perhaps like light catching the wings of one small butterfly, fluttering its way across a huge continent because that is what was made to do, and hope is what we were made to do:

“The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” 

--Wendell Berry