So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.
Interpretation
Embrace the mysteries of life and find joy in the unknown.
Wendell Berry's quote encourages us to engage in actions that may defy logic and to appreciate the complexities of existence. He suggests that we should allow ourselves to embrace uncertainty, laugh, and find joy in the unexplainable, while also recognizing the profound and slow processes of nature that underpin our world. By 'practicing resurrection', he speaks to the idea of renewal and the continuous cycle of life, urging us to live fully and joyfully despite our uncertainties.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to inspire people to embrace unpredictability in their lives.
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.
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
It isn't more light we need, it isn't more truth, and it isn't more scientific data. It is more Christ, more courage, more spiritual insight to act on the light we have.
Money is a handmaiden, if thou knowest how to use it A mistress, if thou knowest not.
Who does his task from day to day and meets whatever comes his way, Believing God has willed it so, has found real greatness here below. Who guards his post, no matter where, believing God must need him there, Although but lowly toil it be, has risen to nobility. For great and low there's just one test, 'tis that each man shall do his best, Who works with all the strength he can, shall never die in debt to man.
"He passed over his fall, and appointed him first of the Apostles; wherefore He said: ' 'Simon, Simon,' etc. (in Ps. cxxix. 2). God allowed him to fall, because He meant to make him ruler over the whole world, that, remembering his own fall, he might forgive those who should slip in the future. And that what I have said is no guess, listen to Christ Himself saying: 'Simon, Simon, etc.'"
Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.
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