Later this morning is the annual pressing of the muscadine and scuppernong grapes. With two-hundred pounds ready to press, it should be the work of a few short hours to convert into juice. And, then another few months of turning that juice into wine. So, with plenty to be thankful for in the short-term, here is one from the archives. This theme, of not being connected with the natural world, is much on my mind. That Los Angeles, poster child for excess and disconnection, a city of 18.79 million, had the great hubris to declare recently a climate emergency, does nothing to ease my mind about the track we are trudging.

Being neither a Catholic in the specific nor religious in the general, I’m surprised to find my farmer’s mind wandering along these paths while watching the sunrise:

It is early Saturday morning and the mists bunch up in the holler near our farm. An ancestor might have thought them in quiet conversation before they lifted slowly in the predawn light. Perhaps it was an act of praise as Brother Sun approached, all rise and disperse.

Brother Sun…he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor.

Would our world be different…better if we had stayed closer to our animist past? Not usually given to speculation on matters theological, I have wondered if Francis of Assisi was moved by that longing when he wrote Canticle of the Sun. One of the few pieces of that heritage that celebrates and loves the natural world, seeing it less for the resources to exploit than for the connectedness of wind, air, moon, sun, dirt and fire.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

A work of looking behind the rational to the inner heart of our connected natural world. A world where we could just as easily have been stone or water and valued as either.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

The power of that vision, an interconnectedness, gives an opportunity for reverence in the use of this world. That an incomprehensible vastness of the universe, springing from a single act, gives us a bond with all that is animate and inanimate. Those ancestors, living in closer communion with the world, knew better of those links than we moderns. We have travelled far from that sense of belonging.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

What would the world look like if that had been our path? Better, worse? I know little of Assisi, whether he felt a kinship to that lost pagan world. Or if he followed a, now lost, tradition of his own religion, one that embraced an element of the animist. An air of lost possibilities hangs over these lines.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits and colored flowers and herbs

That is an outlook of one connected to the land, the peasant tied to the rhythms of the world. One we disdain from the vantage of our disconnected lives. We, who even in death, strive to be apart from the world which gave us birth.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape.

There is consolation in the knowledge that of the poor choices we make, the destruction we wield and the damage done to this world; that the act of creation continues across a universe indifferent to our actions and sense of importance.

And the next act for this farmer may be as a speck of dust, adrift.

…with great humility.

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Still reading, Icelandic Sagas