Enriching the Earth
By: Wendell Berry
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and various legumes, their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth. I have stirred into the ground the offal and the decay of the growth of past seasons and so mended the earth and made its yield increase. All this serves the dark. Against the shadow of veiled possibility my workdays stand in a most asking light. I am slowly falling into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service, for when the will fails so do the hands and one lives at the expense of life. After death, willing or not, the body serves, entering the earth. And so what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song.
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This poem by Wendell Berry has some very striking lines. I was struck in particular by these - which seem to speak to us of surrendering slowly to the will of the earth to break us down into some sort of compost from which other life forms will eventually rise up.
"I am slowly falling into the fund of things. And yet
yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve."
I love this poem. What he is really serving is bacteria, fungus, and other unicellular organisms in quantities beyond imagining. That's where we come from, and that is the community are the we join when we die. In fact, that's what comprises us: trillions of unicellular organisms all doing their darnedest to keep the community going.