So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.
Interpretation
Embrace the mysteries of life and find joy in the unknown.
Wendell Berry's quote encourages us to engage in actions that may defy logic and to appreciate the complexities of existence. He suggests that we should allow ourselves to embrace uncertainty, laugh, and find joy in the unexplainable, while also recognizing the profound and slow processes of nature that underpin our world. By 'practicing resurrection', he speaks to the idea of renewal and the continuous cycle of life, urging us to live fully and joyfully despite our uncertainties.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to inspire people to embrace unpredictability in their lives.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
It's not what enters men's mouth that is evil," said the alchemist. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.
If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.
Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued.
Ability is a wonderful thing, but its value is greatly enhanced by dependability. Ability implies repeatability and accountability.
Security isn't what the wise person looks for - it's opportunity.
Some people cannot see a good thing when it is right here, right now. Others can sense a good thing coming when it is days, months, or miles away.
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