(Hear, I present an essay on my pasture in words, and below, in my voice. Thanks)

Sometimes, when I can no longer think in my study or read another e-mail or listen to another argument, get another intimate message from a total stranger on Facebook, I go out into the pasture. Sometimes the present is too much to bear in my world, on a farm, or anywhere else.

  Sometimes, life around me bears too much resemblance to our failed human history – failed, because it has led to this present that is sometimes such bitterness and a trial. But only sometimes.

And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. They fall into place when I lamb. When the mists shroud the fields on a summer day. When the animals graze, or chew on their hay, or sit quietly and stare out at the world.

When the animals huddle in a circle in a raging snowstorm, and dream of the green pasture, just a few weeks or months away.

The world seems different to me, I think. I enter a kind of social order that makes sense to me, and does not exist in my experience outside, in all of the bustling, crowded, ever-expanding and frantic human spaces.

My wife, a passionate lover of nature, has guided and inspired me in this. We learn from the farm together.

We feel our life taking its place among the lives – the animals, the trees, the barns and haystacks, the plants and flowers, the birds, the living and the dead, the bugs and the lizards and worms, the ferns and the bushes, the ghosts and spirits, the angels and sorcerers – that all have for all time created the life of the earth.

I always think the same thing when I walk in the woods, or out into the pasture. I am not important, and the human race is not that important either. The world is bigger than us, and so much more dignified.

We are all visitors, here for awhile on borrowed time. When we offend God or Mother Nature enough, as we sometimes seem set on doing, they will get rid of us, be done with us, create something else, something better. They will have learned the lessons we did not learn, and it seems, will never learn.

This is not depressing or discouraging for me, this is liberating, spiritual, inspiring. I am free here, and I rejoice in that. There is nothing that can really harm me, or bring me down.

My mind loses its flights and leaps and small fears and conceits and arguments, like nature, I am free, free at last.

The endless machinations and arguments and cruelty of human beings have no relevance here, they mean little and slide overhead honking like the winter geese heading South. Here, there is life in all its purity, and a special kind of love.

The deep woods are especially powerful for us, they grew in their own time, and so will I live and love and work and grow, all in my own time, and die in my own time as well.

I wish to be as steady and proud and dignified as my farm, and as peaceable. It will never harm a living thing, or argue, or hate or divide, no matter what violence is done to it and the land around it.

That is a different way, I think, to see and understand the human world around me, its news and its elections. They are important to many people in some ways, so unimportant in others. They will never define my life or cast a dark shadow over it.

If you would like to hear me reading this, just click on the video below. Thanks.