The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the continuous cycle of life that all living beings experience.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes the natural cycle of existence that encompasses birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay, illustrating the interconnectedness of all living beings. It serves as a reminder that life is a perpetual journey where each stage is essential for the continuation of the cycle, underscoring the beauty and inevitability of lifeβs phases.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one could say, 'As Wendell Berry beautifully puts it, the fertility cycle is a vital reminder of nature's intricate connections.'
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting.
The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe. Not alone when they are in their glory, but in whatever state they are - in leaf, or rimed with frost, or powdered with snow, or crystal-sheathed in ice, or in severe outline stripped and bare against a November sky - we love them.
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