The Feed Store

If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to be enjoyed, even now.

I worked alongside Dad many times. I have also worked alongside other men and women with a disposition towards work like my father’s. They do their labor with skill, creativity, and energy. They rightly earn trust as one to call upon for help with physical jobs.

When cut into chunks, tossed with salt and some brown sugar, and then roasted all afternoon in a very low oven, perhaps with a bit of sauce for the last bit, pork belly becomes a gateway to the real.

But on this day, I am the louse. It’s my “impudence” and “cursed speed” that has made me break what little union I had with my fellow mortals.

For farming to exist sustainably, even from an economic perspective, it must be re-imagined.

We can increase the aesthetic appeal of our neighborhood by smashing the suburban quasi-monocultures of landscaping plants purchased from big box stores and restoring the rightful biodiversity of our ecosystems...Behind the natural beauty there thrums a glory ancient and ever-new that generates love for place, if we let it.

Put in a garden and watch it come to life.

I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.

My infrequent episodes of bringing death to animals have always taken an emotional toll on me. Making a weekly trip to the slaughterhouse for over a decade, as Comis did, seems bound to leave a mark. Can such a wound be redeemed or is the purpose of this pain to dissuade us from the actions that bring it about?

Corrymeela is a dreamscape, a landscape that I marvel at every time I go out there. If conservation consists of loving something—a tract of land, a garden, a wood—then my hope is to love this land even more intensely into its full God-created glory.