A farmer’s vocation.

Working too many hours for too little money. Being tired, being drunk, being lazy. The things that come with post-collegiate life are wearing on the nerves and quickly becoming a bore. Going though Catholic school, when I had the faith of thousands in my small heart, for an extended moment I thought about becoming a religious. I imagined that becoming a sister or a nun was the most beautiful thing a person could do. If one is to have faith that faith should be so strong as to overcome all other ideas and choices. My religious faith has since faded for a number of reasons but at the core the hermetic tradition still gets the better of me. Today it is farmers and farming. I believe that working the earth and nurturing its inhabitants is the most pure work available to modern man. Having faith in the land is as unpredictable as religion. The following poem is certainly a personal account of Seamus Heaney’s life and the joys found in a rural landscape, however, it is also about all naturalists and agriculturalists. We are turning our backs on the industrial world we have been presented and stumbling and making mistakes. There is a side of me that sees the industrial world turning back the fundamentals and begging the farmer to teach him the way. Reading this poem, that marries art and nature so well the reader must ask himself where to divide the two, or simply if he can. Like all religions, the farming vocation is sensual and life enhancing- not denying. In fact, the life of the farmer is nearly Buddhist in that it requires suffering for the most supreme joy.

Blackberry-picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

Seamus Heaney