To Live Savingly

I've just finished reading two essay collections which have refocused my aim in writing: Wendell Berry's latest Our Only World and Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder. Many years ago I decided I could never write fiction: I'm better at articulating my thoughts than I am creating characters. Essays and poems have always been my strength. Often this blog has been a random collection of thoughts, and while I have little doubt that future tangents will spring forth from time to time, I want refocus my work on science, poetry, progress, and hope. So the blog looks a little different: a new name with new pictures. The old posts are still here, as many of them pertain to the new topics, but hence forth I am going to try and fulfill what I see to be a rather empty niche: a philosophically informed bridge between a political pragmatism and the local food movement, between the epistemology of science and popular notions of Truth, between nonbelievers and believers, and between science and the poetry of the pasture.

In the last essay of Berry's collection, "On Being Asked for 'A Narrative for the Future'", he warns us that we can't wait for the future to save the world and that placing our hopes in the government to do it for us might be too little too late. He writes, "Or maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it."* These words have stuck with me. I think I have fallen for the trap from time to time of putting my too much of my faith in big solutions, and while I will still continue in my political idealism in some regards, I find in Berry's words a way out of the cynicism and hopelessness that laps around my edges.

The world isn't changing anytime soon, but when it finally does it won't be because we elected somebody new or because someone wrote a book or a newspaper article. It will be because the tides will have changed. They may culminate in the "political revolution" that Bernie Sanders is calling for, but they might just as easily rise slowly and steadily until the sea wall is breached, and everybody just takes it for granted that elections should be publicly funded and lobbyists shouldn't write legislation. Maybe it will happen in my lifetime, maybe not. There is an urgency in this, make no mistake, but perhaps the fastest route to salvation is many narrow ones, paths the size of each town or neighborhood, rivulets which will inevitably merge into a torrent. So I plan on being a little more intentional with my neighborliness, with my kindness, with my good work, and with my words. But because Wendell Berry has already said it better than I could hope to, I'll leave you with some of his: