MLK

When I learned about MLK in school we learned about his movement against racism, and that's it. Although we learned about his non-violent approach to protest and change, I never remember hearing his words about non-violence. I also never learned about his more unpopular stance against the war in Vietnam. In church I've never heard anyone quote MLK on non-violence and how it stems from his Christian faith. I think its sad that we ignore many parts of his teaching and preaching. Here are some quotes:

"Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."

"Through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder.
Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth.
Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate.
Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that….
Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

"We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say "We must not wage war." It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace."

"So we must fix our vision not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but upon the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a "peace race". If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment."

Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Another Incredible book by Wendell. Read it

p. 38 “They go toward their desire with such violence of haste that they can never arrive. They go to the country to rest, only to reproduce there the noise, haste, confusion-and, surely, the frustration-of city traffic.”
p. 45 “We live in a fallen world by the dangerous presumption that we are unfallen. Only a nation that is conscious of its own guilt can change and renew itself. We are guilty of grave offenses against our fellow men and against the earth, but we have not admitted that we are.”
p, 58 “Christianity and democracy are by definition problematic. Since it may reasonably by doubted that either has been fully and fairly tried by any society, they may even be considered experimental. They have so far produced more questions than answers. But they are commonly presented to the young as solutions-the packages in which all the problems of the human condition are neatly and finally tied up.”
p. “In spite of our repetitious outrage at the violence in our streets and slums, we spend seventy per cent of our revenue on weapons-and so prove beyond doubt that we cannot imagine abetter solution than violence. In spite of our constant lip service to the cause of conservation, we continue to live by an economy of destruction and waste, based on extravagance and ostentation rater than need; we can see no reason to be saving, because we cannot imagine the future of the earth or the lives and the needs of those who will inherit the earth after us.”
p. 70 “Men cannot be taught and encouraged to kill by fostering those impulses of compassion and justice and reasonableness that make it possible to hope for peace... In fight a war, therefore, we are not preparing for peace, but preparing, inevitably, for the next war.”
p. 71 “The fault of the president's widely advertised interest in peace is the weary nationalistic convention that all the wrong is on the other side: we are peace-loving, they are warlike; we are good, they are bad. I am unmoved by this sort of talk simply because I am not able to believe it. And I am no better able to believe the counter-argument that all the wrong is on our side.”
p. 85 “To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.”
p. 87 “If one deplores the destructiveness and wastefulness of the economy, then one is under an obligation to live as far out on the margin of the economy as one is able: to be economically independent of exploitive industries, to learn to need less, to waste less, to make things last, to give up meaningless luxuries, to understand and resist the language of salesmen and public relations experts, to see through attractive packages, to refuse to purchase fashion or glamour or prestige.”
p. 89 “Over a number of years, by trial and error, they might invent a way of life that would be modest in its material means and necessities and yet rich in pleasures and meanings, kind to the land, intricately joined both to the human community and to the natural world-a life directly opposite to that which our institutions and corporations envision for us, but one which is more essential to the hope of peace than any international treaty.”
p. 168 “Men who drudge all their lives in order to retire happily are the victims of a cheap spiritual fashion invented for their enslavement.”
p. 178 “I am forever being crept up on and newly started by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or their own community in it.”
p. 193 “There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty: the spirit of the creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannon follow.”
p. 195 “I find his empty shotgun shells, his empty cans and bottles, his sandwich wrappings... his over-traveled bedsprings, his outcast refrigerator, and heaps of the imperishable refuse of this modern kitchen... I found a possum that he had shot dead and left lying, in celebrations of his manhood. He is the true American pioneer, perfectly at rest in his assumption that he is the first and the last whose inheritance and fate this place will ever be.”
p. 196 “We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to co-operate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
p. 199 “...for such religion as has been openly practice in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, heaven and earth. It has encourage people to believe that the world is of no importance, and that their only obligation in it is to submit to certain churchly formulas in order to get to heaven. And so the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere- to a pursuit of ‘salvation’ that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their own small lives beyond the life of the world. The heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions. This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artificial and ugly division in people’s lives, so that a man, while pursing heaven with the sublime appetite he thought of as his soul, could turn his heart against his neighbors and his hands against the world.”
p. 204 “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of the death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.”

Just finished another incredible book by Wendell Berry... quotes abound!!! Read it!


The Unsettling of America

p. 22 “The so-called professions survive by endlessly ‘processing’ and talking about problems that they have neither the will nor the competence to solve. The doctor who is interested in disease but not in health is clearly in the same category with the conservationist who invests in the destruction of what he otherwise intends to preserve. They both have the comfort of ‘job security,’ but at the cost of ultimate futility.”

p. 28 “The typical present-day conservationist will fight to preserve what he enjoys; he will fight whatever directly threatens his health; he will oppose any ecological violence large or dramatic enough to attract his attention. But he has not yet worried much about the impact of his own livelihood, habits, pleasures, or appetites. He has not, in short, addressed himself to the problem of use. He does not have a definition of his relationship to the world that is sufficiently elaborate and exact.”

p. 32 “The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitable exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.”

p. 41 “And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.”

p. 47 “The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but interdependent. And from a human point of view they are analogical. We can build one system only within another. We can have agriculture only within nature, and culture only within agriculture. At certain critical points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another.”

p. 48 “And it is within unity that we see the hideousness and destructiveness of the
fragmentary-the kind of mind, for example, that can introduce a production machine to increase ‘efficiency’ without troubling about its effect on workers, on the product, and on consumers; that can accept and even applaud the ‘obsolescence’ of the small farm and not hesitate over the possible political and cultural effects; that can recommend continuous tillage of huge monocultures, with massive use of chemicals and no animal manure or humus and worry not at all about the deterioration or loss of soil For cultural patterns of responsible cooperation we have substituted this moral ignorance, which is the etiquette of agricultural ‘progress.’

p. 52 “With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world’s goods and converts them in to garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which we have found a use.”

p. 58 “It is a s if the future is a newly discovered continent which the corporations are colonizing. They have made ‘redskins’ of our descendants, holding them subject to alien values, while their land is plundered of anything that can be shipped home and sold.”

p. 62 “The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”

p. 79 “If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.”

p. 108 “For many of the churchly, the life of the spirit is reduced to a dull preoccupation with getting to Heaven. At best, the world is no more than an embarrassment and a trial to the spirit, which is otherwise radically separated from it. The true lover of God must not be burdened with any care or respect for His works, WHile the body goes about its business of destroying the earth, the soul is supposed to lie back and wait for Sunday, keeping itself free of earthy contaminants. While the body exploits other bodies, the soul stands aloof, free from sin, crying to the gawking bystanders: ‘I am not enjoying it!’ As far as this sort of ‘religion’ is concerned, the body is no more than the lusterless container of the soul, a mere ‘package,’ that will nevertheless light up in eternity, forever cool and shiny as a neon cross. This separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the fringe, no aberration, but a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geologic fault. And this rift in the mentality of religion continues to characterize the modern mind, no matter how secular or worldly it becomes.”

p. 109 “The Bible’s aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony.”

p. 112 “And like the crisis of identity, the crisis of the body brings a helpless dependence on cures. One spends one’s life dressing and ‘making up’ to compensate for one’s supposed deficiencies. Again, the cure preserves the disease. And the putative healer is the guru of style and beauty aid. The sufferer is by definition a customer.”

p. 132 “Marriage and the care of the earth are each other’s disciplines. Each makes possible the enactment of fidelity toward the other. As the household has become increasingly generalized as a function of the economy and, as a consequence, has become increasingly ‘mobile’ and temporary, these vital connections have been weakened and finally broken. And whatever has been thus disconnected has become ground of exploitation for some breed of salesman, specialist, or expert.”

p. 188 “For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land. And we are talking here about seriously damaged but potentially useful land, where American agriculture has so far failed.”

p. 204 “There is no point in saying that perfection of health, as of all else, is not attainable by humans. The point is that we must have the vision of perfection, we must strive for it, we must sense the possibility of approaching it, or we cannot live. Jesus enjoined his followers to be perfect-not, I think, because they could hope for perfection, but because perfection is the necessary standard.”

p. 218 “I do not believe in the efficacy of big solutions. I believe that they not only tend to prolong and complicated the problems they are meant to solve, but that ey cause new problems. On the other hand, if the solution is small, obvious, simple, and cheap, then it may quickly and permanently solve the immediate problem and many others as well.”

First harvest!

Got the first season's harvest this week!!! Cut some pea shoots on thursday that i had planted for a spring cover crop. Used them in tonight's dinner with some raw apple cider vinegar and olive oil. Also made kale with garlic, mashed purple potatoes with parsnip, and oven fried chicken which i had brined, floured, egged, and corn floured. Was probably on of the best chicken meals i've made!! The corn muffin i did not make but picked up from the co-op, caramelized onion and sage! Washed everything down with a mirror pond pale ale. Not a bad meal...

FOOD!

Recent meals. Deer burger with homemade everything. Sauerkraut, hummus, bread, sprouts.

Mexican, homemade everything. Mystery item: corn chili breaded fried tofu!

Just finished Brian Mclaren's book, Finding our way again. A book on rediscovering ancient spiritual practices. Here are a few thoughts of his I enjoyed.

“Those who reject religion are often rejecting a certain arid system of belief, or if not that, a set of trivial taboos or rules or rituals that have lost meaning for them-each the thin residue of a lost way of life.” p. 4

“I wonder what would happen if people today were to rediscover their religions in this light. Moreover, I wonder what would happen if we were willing to risk everything so that people could be not just indoctrinated and informed by dogmatic abstractions and ritual observance, but formed and transformed by spiritual practices, people who learn a way of life so they can move together in movements of peace, shalom, salaam?” p. 38

“My concern is that by making heaven after this life the destination of our way, we are spiritually forming people who run away from fire, disease, and the violence of our world... My concern is that Jesus was more like a firefighter or doctor or social worker who walks boldly into the danger in order to try to stop it. If a healed and healthy earth is your destination, the way to that goal promotes involvement, engagement, risk, and participation. If the earth is a lost cause to you, then you will abandon this life and world for the afterlife. You will choose the way of withdrawal, isolation, self-protection, and self-distancing. By choosing one destination, you follow the way of incarnation and transformation; by choosing the other destination, you choose evacuation and abdication. Very different destinations, very different ways to them.” p. 71

“And maybe imagining that happening is a lot like having faith; in fact, maybe that song was John Lennon’s way of sayng, beautiful even if imprecisely, ‘May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ And maybe the ancient way is about letting that harmony spread in and through our lives.” p. 202

Pizza night!

So believe it or not, but this is the first time I've made pizza in our apartment. My goal was to not buy any ingredients that we didn't already have. This is probably how pizza was originally developed, bread with leftovers on top!

First course: Local salad greens, hood river pears (thanks to mom and dad), raw almonds and sunflower seeds, simple vinaigrette.

Pizza 1: I called it the Rustic; potatoes, sauteed collard greens and cabbage, crimini, sharp cheddar, marinara.

Pizza 2: Marinara and crimini; cheese is expensive!

Pizza 3: Sharp Cheddar, Pear, Herbs. Before and after. Olive Oil it when it first comes out of the oven, Delicious!