“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” -Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is just another common man with some enriched revolutionary sort of heart and mind. He is known as a notable leader of the agrarian movement, detailing how the recovery of agrarian principles is a form of redemption to us and a fresh breath of cultural renewal and well-being. I got into him real good while out at Buckhorn, but I feel like my understanding of everything he stood for had no face to it. Finally about a month ago, I got to go with the ma and pops out to Oregon in an attempt to let them see what I saw, feel what I felt, breathe the air that I felt released me into the family of things. I ended up getting super enriched by their wisdom, and especially their willingness and earnestness to relate with me in this stage, era, whatever of my life. My mom got to tell me about her liberal arts program her first year of college-- a program- which only 35 years later, she had managed to still have ALL her books from that program. One of her monumental books was "Let US Now Praise Famous Men." It's a book written in the late 30s about three tenant families who worked farms in Alabama. It reminisced the daily tasks, ordinary duties to which these men gave of their energy and time on the land of the deep south. Some of the speculation and observation was dull, with somewhat pointless rambling-- but I think that was maybe a subconscious intention. Not a make the book, "interesting" or overtly philosophically and ornately beautiful sounding, because it's not. It's rough. It's raw. It's their lives. But this is where a book is a book. The pictures of these famous man are paper, bound together that sit there on the shelf. Their lives are not perceivable by mere perception. Who really are these men? Is that education? To read, read, read. This is the call to me and the rest of my generation-- with public causes of the environment, technology and human rights--- to put down our damn books, and see the lives of the people around us. Let our movement be the culmination of all the past movements. Not just as Berry puts it, a "public" cause, but let it penetrate deeply, let it encompass in our private lives, daily life. We know the familiar voice-- to go deep, we just have to be willing to tread the land that brings us there.