The Production of a Careful Farmer

Each day I look at this box of seed packets -- fingering the photos of the intentions inside -- and imagine them popping up in my garden.  I know, it's almost an obsession.  It's hardly winter and already I am harvesting a crop in my mind.  A "bumper crop" I'll add, although I allow room for a shriveled potato or two and some undeveloped Bok Choy or the like.  It is a dream, after all, but even dreams have imperfections.  

In reality I harbor more modest expectations.  I have no real idea what, let alone how much, may grow into harvestable splendor as a result of my ministrations.  And I plan to learn from my mistakes and hard experiences.  That said, I'll be sorely disappointed if the field is a barren lot.  This is, after all, about food -- about nourishment and the pleasures of consuming what one has helped to grow.  

But I am a bit sobered by my quick deference to tangible results.  If harvest is the only useful metric then the platform for disillusionment and despair is vast and wide.  Aren't there other, maybe even larger considerations touching soul and soil and self and some things larger even than the horizon of my awareness?  If it is all merely about the perfunctory mechanics of "seed in", "edible out" then it doesn't really matter how it gets done.  If productivity is the only viable measure then pump it in and churn it out.

Even the writing of such possibilities, however, turns the words themselves as powdery and lifeless as the fields we have degraded by our vaunted "green revolution."  Surely, as relevant and desirable is a harvest, there is something richer than merely filled baskets. 

Wendell Berry, ever the deeper observer of such things, writes by way of contrast that, "the real products of any year’s work are the farmer’s mind and the cropland itself."  And then again more pointedly, "The finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer."   (from Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer)

Building soil, growing a mind, and in so doing producing a careful farmer.  I do, indeed, hope something edible matures from all these seeds, but if instead the best that I accomplish is improving the soil and enlarging myself into something deeper and more careful it will have been a season of growing well and appreciatively spent.