…war spreading,
families dying,
the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside,
sowing clover…
~Wendell Berry “February 2, 1968”

However you may come, 
You’ll see it suddenly
Lie open to the light
Amid the woods: a farm
Little enough to see
Or call across—cornfield,
Hayfield, and pasture, clear
As if remembered, dreamed
And yearned for long ago,
Neat as a blossom now
With all the pastures mowed
And the dew fresh upon it,
Bird music all around.
That is the vision, seen
As on a Sabbath walk:
The possibility
Of human life whose terms
Are Heaven’s and this earth’s.

The land must have its Sabbath
Or take it when we starve.
The ground is mellow now,
Friable and porous: rich.
Mid-August is the time
To sow this field in clover
And grass, to cut for hay
Two years, pasture a while,
And then return to corn.

This way you come to know
That something moves in time
That time does not contain.
For by this timely work
You keep yourself alive
As you came into time,
And as you’ll leave: God’s dust,
God’s breath, a little Light.
~Wendell Berry from The Farm

These are fragrant acres where
Evening comes long hours late
And the still unmoving air
Cools the fevered hands of Fate.

Meadows where the afternoon
Hangs suspended in a flower
And the moments of our doom
Drift upon a weightless hour.

And we who thought that surely night
Would bring us triumph or defeat
Only find that stars are white
Clover at our naked feet.
~Tennessee Williams “Clover”

Farming is daily work outside of the constraints of time –
labor done this day is caring for what is eternal,
despite weather, war, uncertainty.

There is a timelessness about summer:
the preparing and planting and preserving,
a cycle of living and dying repeating through generations.

We, like our farming forebears, will become God’s dust again.

I’m reminded, walking through our pasture’s clover,
I become seed and soil for the next generation.
Like a blossom so plain and unnoticed during its life,
I enfolds myself back to the ground, sighing and dying.

Perhaps it is the breath of clover
we should remember at the last,
as God’s own breath.

Inhale deeply of Him in the dust of the clover field.