“He lives the song he sings just as many of us sing the songs we don’t live.”
–Richard Taylor
It is a subject as old as the Roman poets: trying to live the song we sing. No doubt, as long as members of our race have felt consoled by the comforting embrace of empire, they have felt the snare grip their ankle as they tried to reclaim whatever was felt to them as an authentic life.
This blog is about farming, about the life of working the farm and the subtle ways that that life changes the participant. My farm life is a journey. A journey, if you will, about living those songs I sing. A journey that has taught me to live songs, often heard as if at a great distance, with muted lyrics, songs that once learned help loosen the grip of the snare.
Looking back over these 16 years of posts, certain themes regularly emerge: changes by a birth or death, the cycles of seasons, mistakes learned over and over again, the value of a willing partner, the companionship of friends and family, the rediscovery of the art of observing, the liberating value of work performed.
So too revelations of being more profoundly conservative and liberal than previously imagined. Not the conservative mindset of our chattering classes, with their mania of global commerce, their cavalier resource depletion, and their religious litmus tests. But instead, the timeless conservativism of careful consideration to structure, change, technology, land, and relationships. A growing awareness that progress and change, as needed on a farm, best proceed from thoughtful slowness.
And not the liberalism of our contemporary world, a cultural leveling to the lowest common denominator or the mire of identity politics–an effort to redress ills with broad strokes and imperial power–but a liberalism derived out of observation, of slowness, community, and responsibility, that by those acts, the world observed is seen with very different eyes. A narrowing of one’s focus, a localizing of compassion, can flower to encompass a wider realm.
Odd how this life has given this participant an active tolerance and intolerance concurrently: the former for the beauty and diversity of the natural world of which I am a part, the latter for the bad and boorish behavior of our own acts and the larger self-absorbed modernity.
How any of us loosens the snares that bind us is our own journey, our own song. It is, for me, the agrarian life, or at least my own approximation of how it should be lived, that continues to exercise a power to change. I still don’t know if I am living the song. But those lyrics, once muted, are now heard with greater clarity.
This was a post from the archives that is as true to me today as when written, perhaps more so.
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The Unbroken Thread: discovering the wisdom of tradition in an age of chaos (S. Ahmari)
Beautifully written, Brian. I loved how you described an intertwining view of liberalism and conservatism and tied to your experiences learned on the farm. It is becoming increasingly difficult hold both conservative and liberal views “concurrently”. Too many people have created an ideological divide that ignores the spectrum that really exists. Life is indeed both conservative and liberating.
I loved this sentence “a growing awareness that progress and change, as needed on a farm, best proceed from thoughtful slowness.” Progress and change, the foundation of liberal views, are indeed needed on a farm, and they proceed with thoughtful slowness, the epitome of conservative thinking! You hit the nail squarely. “Liberalism derived out of observation, of slowness, community, and responsibility, that by those acts, the world observed is seen with very different eyes.” Indeed, with close observation “narrowing our focus” we can observe the subtle differences in ever shifting patterns of life. Few people, I think, realize that freeing our mind (the most liberating of actions) can only be “derived out of observation” of narrowing our focus in order to see truth in front of us.
Conservation isn’t about never changing, and progress isn’t a leveling to a common denominator, but rather both are an appreciation of what is real and true. “A narrowing of one’s focus, a localizing of compassion, can flower to encompass a wider realm.” It is a paradox, that only by narrowing our view can we realize the widest view.
Thanks for sharing a wonderful Sunday reading.
Jody,
Thanks for the kind and observant comment. Funny that: What we do in the day-to-day shapes our culture and our politics. That, for example, in the later nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth the classic mid-west farmer was both a rock-ribbed conservative and staunch advocate for a reasonable safety net and a critic of unrestrained capitalism, doesn’t surprise. That was their day to day lived farm experience.
It is easy to draw conclusions, some that may be in error. But, I moved to the land in part to rethink my assumptions about what it meant to be a citizen and a member of a community. Possibly, because of the type of farm we run and the area we live in, it has transformed me in ways I’m only beginning to fathom.
Cheers,
Brian
Work that gives us both challenge and satisfaction is important in living a life of meaning. Some days as I climb down off my loader, stiff and sore from sitting too long, I still feel a sense of satisfaction from what I accomplished. Perhaps today people waste too much time on social media, time that is unproductive. We don’t form the deeper attachments that come from shared work or a shared meal, deeper attachments that real give us a sense of community.
Jody,
“We don’t form the deeper attachments that come from shared work or a shared meal, deeper attachments that real give us a sense of community.” More and more I have come to feel that much could be resolved by a regular meal with simple conversation, with ones children, spouse, family, community.
Cheers,
… and the area we live in…
Interesting. Counting the farm I grew up on, the communities where I was in college and did agricultural research (2), and the two communities where I’ve been employed, I count 5 areas where I’ve lived and worked in agriculture. All 5 are in the Midwest, stretching from Eastern Nebraska to Central Ohio. The similarities among them likely outstrip the differences (though if enough energy were spent I likely could come up with some pretty significant differences). But on top of the contrasts between the locations is the stage of my own life journey when I came to be in these places.
When at home – where I grew up – I notice real differences from the community I recall from my youth. Sure, it has changed some… but so have I. How much of the difference noticed is due to changes in my own perspective? The elder members of that community when I was there are now gone. My childhood peers are now the elders (or on the verge of being the elders).
I’ve also been fortunate enough to travel around the planet for various aspects of agricultural research. When I contemplate the similarities among the 5 locations mentioned above and then contrast them to areas in Argentina, Chile, Kazakhstan, and Japan, the whole of the Midwest seems like one huge and homogeneous community. Language and culture are obvious differences, but climate, weather, and soils vary VERY significantly. Thus I’m now wondering just how much a ‘place’ impacts who and what we are.
I’m glad you put that phrase in the post.
Food for continued thought. I threw the Mid-west into my comments because I have a great fondness for what remains of that distinctive culture. In our contemporary instant culture one feels the need to identify the healthy threads that bind before they are pulled away and unraveled.