Agrarian Spirit by Norman Wirzba

Author:Norman Wirzba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2022-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes I can no longer think in the house or in the garden or in the cleared fields. They bear too much resemblance to our failed human history—failed because it has led to this human present that is such a bitterness and a trial. And so I go to the woods. As I go under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I feel my life take its place among the lives—the trees, the annual plants, the animals and birds, the living of all these and the dead—that go and have gone to make the life of the earth. I am less important than I thought, the human race is less important than I thought. I rejoice in that. My mind loses its urgings, senses its nature, and is free. The forest grew here in its own time, and so I will live, suffer and rejoice, and die in my own time. There is nothing that I may decently hope for that I cannot reach by patience as well as by anxiety.30

In this passage Berry is not only describing a need for encounters with wildness. He is also alerting us to a posture or bodily comportment in which people open themselves to the many diverse life forms and ecological processes that intersect with and move through their living.

Given the storied and social character of life, we should also expect that paths of transformation will require people to know the histories of their community’s coming-to-be. To go deeply into a place is not only to encounter wildness. It is also to learn the stories of how your place came to be the specific place that it is. How have the events of the past shaped what is happening here now and what is possible in the future?

To see why attention to history matters, consider the “Pilgrimages of Pain and Hope” that are organized by DurhamCares in Durham, North Carolina.31 The aim of these pilgrimages is for people living in Durham to understand how their neighborhoods came to be and how their coming-to-be is affecting the life that is happening there now. Histories of the displacement of indigenous peoples, slavery and a plantation economy, but also Jim Crow and redlining policies, are still working themselves out today as African Americans and other people of color struggle to achieve equity and justice in housing and business development. Durhamites need to understand, for instance, that the construction of the Durham Expressway did not simply make it easier for some residents to travel from one location to another. It also cut through the heart of established African American communities and thereby effectively undermined their future development. They need to know how the financial backing of preferred industries and businesses created forms of employment and salary structures that, in turn, fostered social hierarchies and neighborhood inequities that have yet to be addressed.

These pilgrimages are so important because they get residents to walk through their neighborhoods so they can physically see how events of the past have shaped their place’s architecture and design.

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