Intending to look for beauty and hope in a dark season is admirable, but how does one sustain the practice? Short cuts and how-to recipes don’t last. Sheer willpower eventually becomes grim determination. Imagination, honest work, and genuine delight are needed to break the chains of apathy and despair.
Consumer culture offers countless ways to narcotize body and mind with the promise of more and better things. Not that this is entirely new. In 1804, William Wordsworth wrote, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Perfected over the next two centuries, that system now functions much as T.S. Eliot said of history, “She gives when our attention is distracted/And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions/That the giving famishes the craving.” It’s a vicious circle all the more cruel in a time of selective economic hardship, festering racial injustice, and ballooning inequality.
Politicians and profiteers make their living by playing on resentments and fears. Freedom is reduced to pursuing the next treasure or experience and adding it to a closely guarded private hoard. Happiness becomes the absence of pain. Truly joyful people, in contrast, don’t seek to escape the world’s burden of suffering. They cultivate active compassion. Compassionate people face suffering and adversity with confidence and grace, having made a duty of delight. Freedom is found in consent, not consumer choice. Some call it madness, but joy is meant to be shared, thrives in community, grows when given away.
As the old year gives way to the new, many search for fresh ways to resist the darkness. Bold resolutions come easy, but old habits die hard. Here’s a poem by Wendell Berry showing us ways to rejoice, reimagine, and renew.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
From New Collected Poems by Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, 2012.
Image: Mahalia by Charles White, 1955.