The slow work of growth and death

I've just rediscovered "The Work of Local Culture," the 1988 Iowa Humanities Lecture given by my former University of Kentucky colleague and friend, Wendell Berry. The lecture is available online at the E. F. Schumacher Society site.

Wendell begins by describing an old bucket hanging on a fence post on his family's farm. He writes:

I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on inside that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is a microcosm of earth-making.

He continues:

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two.

This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

A couple of paragraphs later, Wendell returns to the bucket to help him make the central point of his lecture:

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account.

(Portrait by Robert Shetterly at AmericansWhoTellTheTruth.org)