I love the farmhouse window locks. Think about what it took to make each one. And this one works after more than 100 years.

Some philosophers – Wendell Berry, others – believe that the ignorant use of knowleldge allows technology, corporate and political power to override the question of scale, because it overridesrespect for the integrity of the individual and local eco and other systems. Thus free trade is more important than jobs and work, technology more powerful than the people it serves, politics serves money and corporations, not people, profits are more important than security and well being, ratings more important than real news, tests more important than health, the lawyer who represented the law, the artist who needs to live cheaply, the banker who knew his customers, the lowest cost of food and products more important than the family farmer, the neighborhood pharmacist, the local grocer, the operator who takes your call and actually speaks to you.

All these and many more are sacrifices to this arrogant idea of prosperity at all costs – the new religion.

Not surprisingly, lmost all of us are frustrated, harried, and sometimes angry at our interractions with the outside world. We feel small, disregarded and unheard.

What can we do? Arrogance cannot be cured by greater arrogance, anger is not sated by equivalent anger, argument doesn’t lead to reason, only more argument. Reading Wendell Berry late last night, he reminded me of Robert Frost’s geat political pastoral “Build Soil,” a poem I would have considered woo-woo drivel until I moved to the country and witnessed the ongoing and systematic destruction of rural and individual life by this insane notion of modern economics.

But I loved this line:

“I bid you to a one-man revolution –

The only revolution that is coming.”

That line struck me, and powerfully. We are, most of us, truly helpless to affect the great shifts and upheavals of the world, or even those right her in our own country. The only revolution truly possible is a one-man revolution.

We can change  ourselves. We can stop trying to run other revolutions, and run our own. We can remove our minds from the corporate ignorance and fear and arrogance and greed  that is disconnecting us from much of what we love and need in the world. We can confront our own ignorance, arrogance and our need. And as Berry suggests, “we can take guidance from the knowledge we most authentically posess, from experience, from tradition, and from the inward promptings of affection, conscience, decency, compassion, even inspiration.”

In others words, spirituality.

I cannot tell anybody else what to do. I can passionately avoid the culture of argument, anger and justification. I can seek spirituality, rebirth, enlightenment.  So in that sense, I am in full revolt.

Welcome to my one-man revolution.