-By William Bryant Logan 2007 Non-Fiction 202 Pages-
A BOOK BENEDICTION -For Reading
M ay we be granted, on barefoot sunny day, to feel the sunstrike, on top our rolling head & raised eyebrows, energizing and sinking down to the tips of our dancing still standing feet, impressed into the black charred ashed and ancient soil. May we recognize, the black virtuous life giving membrane of the earth, tilled by the hands of God. May it grant to us the eyes to see, heart to wonder, ears to listen, will to tend & faith to understand, this ground we walk 'pon, so close neath our standing, clay formed figures.
PAGE LEAFING -Thoughts & Impressions
T his was my first personal book re-read of the year. I first read it roughly 18 months ago. I would compare reading it to that of receiving a warm home made loaf of bread from a friend. Hearty & life giving. The impression of the initial read has not left my mind. One of rather awed and sculpted beauty, historical laced prose with words and phrases so close to the hands, often I felt led to read certain lines aloud. As if I were reading from The Psalter. Often times I would want to run outside barefoot in the rain and dance, stand on, feel the presence of, that speckled life giving black ocean neath our feet- dirt. Mr. Logan's strong and wise presence of mind and soul shine forth in the ink of this book bright. An author who seems to be able to clearly articulate mystery & beauty in such a way, as to help you grasp and wrestle it down from the moon, to have and to hold, to look at for one moment, catch a few contours in the face, 'fore it flys back up in the sky. He jumps, digs, tugs, lifts, pulls into all different territorial grounds of geology, theology, history, husbandry, and soils. Giving you such rich abundant crop of wise encounter & life experience, one comes to receive dirt almost for the first time, as a new truth and revelation, as the soil, as the earth, as the land, as a giver of life, a gifted & balanced virtuous place of transformation, celebration & offering, one we should hold each day.
TAKE FIVE -Book Samples
"Hospitality is the fundamental virtue of the soil. It makes room. It shares. It neutralizes poisons. And so it heals. This is what the soil teaches: If you want to be remembered, give yourself away."
"A great deal of the world's wisdom is contained in manure. Not only the grain in the mealbag but the full-blown rose are, in one sense, the gift of turds."
"Even into this century, when a country girl was going to be married in France, they fixed the amount of her dowry according to the weight of the manure produced on her father's farm."
"It isn't that we have lost the technology. We are simply missing the inner resources that make for real craft."
"We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. 'It must be up there on the horizon,' we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet."
A PHOTO CONCLUSION -Visual Thought
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