Louisville Process Theology Network

“Because the soil is alive, various, and intricate and
because its processes yield more readily to imitation that to analysis, more
readily to care than coercion, agriculture can never be an exact science.

There is an inescapable kinship between farming and art, for
farming depends as much on character, devotion, imagination, and the sense of
structure, as on knowledge. It is a practical art.

But it is also a practical religion, a practice of religion,
a rite. By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter,
light, and darkness. In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy
again and again through the seasons and the bodies of living things, we
recognize the only infinitude with reach of the imagination.  

How long this cycling of energy will continue we do not know;
it will have end, at least here on this planet, sometime with the remaining life
of the sun.

But by aligning ourselves with it here, in our little time
with the unimaginable time of the sun’s burning, we touch infinity; we align
ourselves with the universal law that brought cycles into being and will survive
them”

Page 87 from “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture” by
Wendell Berry