Happy Midsummer!

Happy Midsummer!

I conceive of Midsummer being an arc that begins with the Solstice (an ever-so-slightly movable feast), climaxes and concludes with St John's Day.

In service to Life and in alignment with Nature, we live in season and plug in to the Universal with all our heart -- and gut. Midsummer is intuitive. You already know how to celebrate it. The season resists imperative. The whole earth, which you are a brilliant feature of, knows what to do and has for millennia. It is as plain as the Sun on your face. You will see in the poem below, which I post as a Midsummer offering, that Wendell Berry has plenty of advice to go around, anyhow. I think embodies so much of the spirit of Midsummer, of sprawling, defiant, willful, magnificent, thriving life that attunes to no commands but those of its own pulse and necessity. So I hope you enjoy the poetic offering, although I am enjoined from advising you to read it!

So let any possible advisements I might have in this season to be in the form of blessings for you and me. May we embody even one of the virtues Mr Berry insists upon. May we all be like foxes, tracking back and forth, evasive, clever, untamed, irritatingly and insistently repetitive, trance-inducingly boring in our unpredictability, about our own covert activities, ferociously solicitous of the needs of pregnant women; may we be cultivators of compost, stewards of sequoias, farmers of everything that is magnificent, naturing, green to growth and grand. May we and may you in particular have all the blessings of the Sun and the Earth and the season as you are part of what my life has raised and is raising and I thank you so much for it.

Great Midsummer!
Be Blessed,
Your fellow Mad Solstice Farmer Laura

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade.
Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.