Amish Economy, Wendell Berry

   We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks,
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation's neighborhood.

And my friend David Kline told me,
"It falls strangely on Amish ears,
This talk of how you find yourself.
We Amish, after all don't try
To find ourselves. We try to lose
Ourselves"--and thus are lost within
The found world of sunshine and rain
Where fields are green and then are ripe,
And the people eat together by
The charity of God, who is kind
Even to those who give no thanks.

In morning light, men in dark clothes
Go out among the beasts and fields.
Lest the community be lost
Each day they must work out the bond
Between the goods and their price: the garden
Weeded by sweat is flowerbright;
The wheat shocked in shorn fields, clover
Is growing where wheat grew; the crib
Is golden with the gathered corn,

While in the world of the found selves,
Lost to the sunlit rainy world,
The motor-driven cannot stop.
This is the world where value is
Abstract, and preys on things, and things
Are changed to thoughts that have a price.
Cost + greed - fear = price:
Maury Telleen thus laid it out.
The need to balance greed and fear
Affords no stopping place, no rest
And need increases as we fail.

But now, in summer dusk, a man
Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
Sits under the yard trees, at rest
His smallest daughter on his lap.
This is because he rose at dawn,
   Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
   Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.

I love Wendell Berry ....this poem has had me thinking all week.  How often I run
around like crazy and make things more difficult than they need to be.I do not want
to live in a world that affords no stopping place. I want to fix these words in my
mind this week as I care for my family....

Poetry Wednesday