Slowing the Pace of Living, Part 2nd

Continuing from last time:

 . . .

To break experience in half and call one side physical 

and the other spiritual is narrowing and confusing. People 

do not live dependent on food. Ultimately, we cannot know 

what food is. It would be better if people stopped even 

thinking about food. Similarly, it would be well if people 

stopped troubling themselves about discovering the "true 

meaning of life,-" we can never know the answers to great 

spiritual questions, but it's all right not to understand. We 

have been born and are living on the earth to face directly 

the reality of living. 

Living is no more than the result of being born. 

Whatever it is people eat to live, whatever people think 

they must eat to live, is nothing more than something they 

have thought up. The world exists in such a way that if 

people will set aside their human will and be guided instead 

by nature there is no reason to expect to starve. 

Just to live here and now — this is the true basis of 

human life. When, a naive scientific knowledge becomes 

the basis of living, people come to live as if they are 

dependent only on starch, fats, and protein, and plants on 

nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash. 

And the scientists, no matter how much they 

investigate nature, no matter how far they research, they 

only come to realize in the end how perfect and mysterious 

nature really is. To believe that by research and invention 

humanity can create something better than nature is an 

illusion. I think that people are struggling for no other 

reason than to come to know what you might call the vast 

incomprehensibility of nature. 

So for the farmer in his work: serve nature and all is 

well. Farming used to be sacred work. When humanity fell 

away from this ideal, modern commercial agriculture rose. 

When the farmer began to grow crops to make money, he 

forgot the real principles of agriculture. 

Of course the merchant has a role to play in society, 

but glorification of merchant activities tends to draw people 

away from a recognition of the true source of life. Farming, 

as an occupation which is within nature, lies close to this 

source. Many farmers are unaware of nature even while 

living and working in natural surroundings, but it seems to 

me that farming offers many opportunities for greater 

awareness. 

"Whether autumn will bring wind or rain, I cannot 

know, but today I will be working in the fields." Those are 

the words of an old country song. They express the truth of 

farming as a way of life. No matter how the harvest will 

turn out, whether or not there will be enough food to eat, in 

simply sowing seed and caring tenderly for plants under 

nature's guidance there is joy.

Source:  The One-Straw Revolution, https://archive.org/stream/The-One-Straw-Revolution/The-One-Straw-Revolution_djvu.txt, opened 28 Feb. 2017

Since Fukuoka-san’s words strongly echo the life lived at typical Orthodox monasteries, we have included a few pictures from one, the Holy Dormition Dalmatovo Monastery in Western Siberia, http://www.pravoslavie.ru/foto/set1624.htm, opened 3 March 2017:

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð!

Anathema to the Union!