This week, my friends at Share Our Strength shared a beautiful speech by Wendell Berry, delivered recently to the Garden Club of America. His always poetic and poignant words seem to have the wisdom of ages, as well as the answer for today’s age. Here’s an excerpt from his speech that I couldn’t resist sharing with you:

Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than the summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits. 

Many people suggest that the answer to the economic crises and America’s joblessness is retraining, and re-education. I can think of no better education, and no more befitting training for our time and age than that we receive in the garden. In the words of Mr. Berry, let’s go back to school.

-Sarah Copeland