Tag: tilling

Plowing Deep for Love

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Photo by Joel DeWaard

It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
the gayety in the stride 
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.
~Wendell Berry “Goods”

photo by Joel De Waard
photo by Joel De Waard
photo by Joel De Waard
photo by Joel De Waard

It’s not likely anyone would say I didn’t work hard enough.

After all, I come from a long line of human work-horses
who knew it takes sweat and tears, and sometimes bleeding.

Even so, all those years
I know I could have plowed more deeply than I did.

I could have thrown myself more fully
into the pull on the tugs,
shared the load more effectively,
shouldered the yoke with greater enthusiasm,
bent my neck down low with unbroken determination.

You could say somewhere
I lost the gayety in my stride,
and you would be right —
toward the end, I was trudging through the furrow,
bruised from turning up too many submerged rocks,
bumping into immoveable tree stumps,
tripping on hidden roots,
stuck in the deep mud
of long and lonely post-midnight hours.

You might even say the knowledge of a job well-done
lay at a depth my plow could ever reach.

I had seen others die in the harness,
never able to rest easy.

A few years ago I knew
the time had come
to shrug off the yoke,
shake off the bridle and bit,
shudder free of the harness.

On this side of the ground,
I find myself wondering and wandering,
the blinkers no longer impeding my vision,
feeling the morning sun on my unyoked withers.

Yet when I see an untilled field,
something in me even now
still tries to hold on to the plow —

photo by Joel De Waard
photo by Joel De Waard
photo by Joel De Waard

While We Sleep

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Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.
~Wendell Berry

Every day this time of year I scramble to the top of the hay pile in the barn to push down two bales to feed to our horses, now that the pastures are resting and “left to grace” for the winter.  My husband has been busy spreading our composted manure out on the fields to give them an extra fertilizer boost for next spring’s growth, only a little more than four months away.

As farmers, we have to always be thinking one or two seasons ahead:  the hay brought into the barn in June or July does not leave the barn until late-autumn.  The manure piled up in winter gets spread on pastures the following fall.  The tilled cornfields surrounding us are seeded in May and not harvested until October after several months of rain and sun and rain again.

More than practicing forethought, as farmers we know our meager efforts, as tangible as they are, are dependent solely on grace: that there will be enough rain, that there will not be too much rain, that there will be enough days of sunlight, that the seed will sprout, that the machinery will work when needed, that there will be no blight or pests, and that the hay crew will materialize when needed for harvest.   So much of this is not due to the labor of our hands, no matter how much we sweat and ache, but due to the great work of the Creator in His Creation.

Every hay bale I open spills forth His mercy, a reminder of how grateful I am for seed and sun and rain and a barn full of promises.