Thursday, October 25, 2018

Joy From Nature

In the Catholic Peace Weekly, a city dweller returns to the country to farm. He has become a farmer's poet and writes an ode to nature and the joy it has given him.
 

His house is 30 years old with a lot of stories to tell.   He recalls a young couple who were planning to marry and even rented the room in which they were to live and bought a wardrobe cabinet but broke up because of family problems. The prospective couple left the cabinet in the room and sold it to the poet and his wife for half price.

When the neighbors heard they were thinking of buying the cabinet they with one voice, as if it was their situation, disapproved. Why not spend a few more dollars and buy a new one? Buying the cabinet of the failed couple will bring bad luck and many similar warnings continued.  The farmer and his wife were going to live in a one room situation and not open to spending money, so the suggestions fell on deaf ears.
 

Both he and his wife have had the cabinet for 30 years and they have lived well without any fuss. What does it mean to live well?  You eat, poop, and live honestly he says.
 

He and his wife one day recently sat in front of the wardrobe cabinet of the couple who broke up before marriage and exchanged stories. They hoped both found happiness in their new marriages and life.  All that stuff about bad luck buying the wardrobe of the couple, all nonsense.
 

That's right. He and his wife have become mountain dwellers. Not like living in the city where you have a monthly salary to look forward to.  So they have a lot of second-hand goods scattered throughout the house: clothing, shoes, luggage, electronic goods are almost all used goods. He and his  wife had a good laugh  "They are living  a secondhand life."
 

If you lived in a city surrounded by cement and asphalt and have lived with God-made forests, in comparison there is nothing besides comforts that money can buy, that they are missing.
 

However, what we have received in the mountain living are just too many to list. When you go to bed in the 17 pyeong earthen house and wake up in the morning, like an alarm clock, the mountain birds and grass insects are ready to sing for you. Better than any air conditioner is the mountain breezes, clean fresh air comes from the nearby forests. Mountain rivulets never dry; healthy, fresh green plants grow in a nearby garden, both on the mountains and plains you have all kinds of herbs and wild greens to eat.
 

No need to go by car to see the beautiful stirrings of nature. Each season has its flowers which bloom on their own: Purslanes, garden Portulaca, four o'clock flowers, and the sour-sweet wild raspberries are there. In the evening the shining abundance of stars but better than all are the grandmothers who like children one-moment sulky and the next moment laughing...You can't buy this with money. They are natures gift and joy.
 

On the day he wrote this he and his wife from 5 o'clock to 9 o'clock in the morning were out in the field working with the Sorghum and mung beans. Tired and sweating they returned to the house to wash and drink a fresh glass of water. His wife like a small child laughing: Water is delicious, a free gift of nature.