Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;
Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal…
However just and anxious I have been,
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup
— Wendell Berry
From John Michael Greer comes this reflection on the value of from-scratch cooking with basics:
I want to talk about something a good deal more basic: the awkward fact that the food you can produce in your backyard garden, or acquire in any other way likely in a deindustrializing world, does not magically appear in the forms that most Americans are used to consuming. A nation used to eating factory-breaded chicken tenders and JoJos to go is going to face some interesting traumas when food once again consists of live chickens, raw turnips, and fifty-pound sacks of dry navy beans.
It’s easy as well as entertaining to poke fun at America along these lines, but the difficulties involved are very real. A very large fraction of today’s Americans, provided with a plucked chicken, a market basket of fresh vegetables, and that fifty-pound sack of navy beans, would be completely at a loss if asked to convert them into something tasty and nourishing to eat…
You may be thinking that it’s all very well to praise home-cooked meals produced from raw materials, but cooking that way is a very time-consuming process, not to mention one that involves a vast amount of hard work. You’ve seen the gyrations that actors in chef hats go through in cooking programs on TV, you’ve glanced over the forbidding pages full of exotic ingredients and bizarre processes that make today’s gourmet cookbooks read like so many tomes of dire enchantment out of bad fantasy fiction, you’ve seen racks of women’s magazines that treat elaborate timewasting exercises disguised as cooking instructions as a goal every family ought to emulate, and you’ve unconsciously absorbed the legacy of most of a century of saturation advertising meant to convince you that cooking things for yourself from scratch is an exercise in the worst sort of protracted drudgery, and probably gives you radioactive halitosis and ring around the collar to boot, so you really ought to give it up and go buy whatever nice product the nice man from the nice company is trying to sell you.
If all this has convinced you that you don’t have time to cook, dear reader, you have been had.
Read the whole thing.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
— Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
With gratitude for those who have sacrificed that I might have the opportunity to be free… I will be spending this day in work and thought.
For thought, I’ll begin by reading the text of the Declaration of Independence. It’s been too long.
And then, some working for freedom.
God bless.
David, unprompted, at dinner last night:
Mommy, these [hamburgers] are lots better than the ones from the drive-through!
Take that, McDonalds!
For example, being able to do for yourself without depending on foreign sources? Pat Buchanan has an interesting article, The Hollowing Out of America, discussion the collapse of our manufacturing base and the Third-Worlding of our economy.
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