From my journal: In the March 8th Christian Century, Kyle Childress has written a wonderful piece about the thought of philosopher/farmer Wendell Berry. He quotes Berry: "During the last 17 years … I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken 17 years. It can be better than it is now, but that will take longer. For it to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years."

You can find this quote in Berry's The Art of the Commonplace (Counterpoint Press, 2002), a book to which I have returned after reading Childress's comments. Berry is worth reading if you don't mind being knocked off balance a bit. He is not your blue-blooded ...