Week 12

Am I the only one who thinks that there was even less to write about this week than there was last week? I mean, we at least had good ol' Wendell Berry to discuss and evaluate last week, which is always fun, but this week, on the other hand, it almost seems as if we were slapped in the face with a couple of grim novels about unfortunate people struggling to make ends meet when the crap hits the fan in all areas of their lives. Oh, yeah, the novels were about farming, too.

Where is the value in that? At this point in the class and amid this current global episode in human history, must the bleakness of this world be reiterated? I think we get it by now. Hence, a hopeless depiction of humanity is surely not what we need to be exposed to right now, so why, then, are we being exposed to it? What is our goal in this? Are we increasing our appreciation of the earth by continually inspecting its imminent brokenness? Are we trying to become one with the earth and its Creator by becoming familiar with creation's problems? Doesn't this all seem a bit counter-intuitive? I could hash out my beef with the seemingly overwhelmingly pessimistic course material again, but anything I have to say about that subject has already been said in previous blog posts. I'll lay off of it this week and try to branch out in a bit of a different direction.

There was one thing that I did find rather apparent in both of the dark, depressing novels from this week: the value and implications of our interactions and relationships with others. In John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, he portrays people having no means of surviving the day other than relying on each other to help provide for one another; people helping other people thus constitutes as healthy relationships, according to Steinbeck. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, on the other hand, portrays a very different side of human interactions and concludes that people abusing, killing (or at least attempting to), abandoning, and sleeping with other people constitutes as unhealthy relationships. I'd buy that. That makes pretty good sense to me. In either novel, though, relationships form the characters' personalities and affect their experiences throughout the story. In essence, then, I felt the novels were as much about man's relationship with fellow man as they were about man's relationship with the earth.

So what?

Well, maybe this truth is what ends up reconciling me with this class this semester. In these novels, when the characters are faced with difficulties, the adequate response, as implied by the authors, seemingly is to rely on others to survive troubled times, so maybe that's the solution to surviving these "troubled times" in this class. Throughout this semester, we've all been exposed to the same brokenness; we've all been together when we've seen the "crap hit the fan." So what ought our response be? Well, if we apply what these novels seem to imply, then we ought to stick together amid this abundant negativity to avoid being overwhelmed.

To me, this means that I ought to get out from behind this computer screen when voicing my concerns and actually attempt to become a part of the community of our cohort. This doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to be raising my hand every six minutes in class; I think it's fairly obvious that that's just not who I am. Rather, like it's been established in class, it all goes back to a change of character more than it does a change of behavior. Thus, I need to fix my attitude. I need to stop viewing class discussion as a time of overly harsh criticisms and unnecessarily pessimistic analyses that lead to my disinterest in participation in the community and instead think of it as an opportunity to enhance my relationship with "fellow man" in order to avoid becoming exhausted from dissecting the class material on my own. Even if the thoughts I conjure when alone are meaningful and productive, there's only so much I can gain when distancing myself from the majority of our cohort. What can I say, though? Sometimes introversion gets the best of me.

I know I always seem to be learning a new lesson different from that which was presented in class each week, and I know that seems like I'm avoiding learning from the actual course material. Do know that that's not the case. There's just only so much that I can learn about agriculture and ecology, so I'm simply doing my best to find principles in the class sessions that apply directly to my life and help me come to peace with my difficulties and disagreements with this semester's class.