One of the benefits of aging is the ability to know the many puzzling ways in which the parents and childhood you’ve long left behind for the sake of adventure were actually good and right. It is a kind of poignant circular return—having wandered off so far perhaps only to finally “know the place for the first time.” 

That place is as richly layered as a mille-feuille; it is topography, landscape, relationship, atmosphere, gentle expectations, unspoken truths— all of which make for the feeling of home, something that can be neither bought, sold, marketed, nor acquired through cheating, only through tenderness and hard work. 

To make a home in the world is the most beautiful, delicate, and sometimes heart-breaking thing that I know. A home needs a place, some people carefully selected for you by the Universe, and a relentless will to love them both. No one has written as beautifully about this as Wendell Berry, in my mind the most important American writer of our time. Berry, who has been a prolific poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer, as well as—and critically so—a Kentucky farmer for over six decades, knows what a home is. In a 2002 essay published after the 9/11 attacks, Two Minds, he wrote of the damages wrought by the “Rational Mind,” the mind that seeks to conquer, flatten out, ‘improve,’ “exclude everything that cannot empirically or experimentally be proven to be a fact.” That mind, which drives our global economy, government, and education, wants so very much to be “objective- which is to say, unremembering and disloyal.” Against it, Berry sketched the value of the “sympathetic Mind,” an “outdoor mind,” anchored not in “analysis and manipulation” but in our shared “creatureliness.” The essay is just as relevant today as it was twenty year ago, with its depiction of the placelessness, crowdedness, centralization and anonymity that have made perfect conditions for terrorism, chronic loneliness, pandemics, you name it. 

Against a contemporary political and economic model that dislocates people from land, family members from each other (long work hours, crazy homework, addictive technology, ‘what’s-in in-for-me?’ cultural zeitgeist), fundamental value from market value, and cause from consequence, he suggests the only sane approach to living is for the human mind to work “on a scale much smaller than the Rational Mind will easily accept… the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.”

To think and love at the same time means to do as little as possible that could result in injury to yourself, others, your place, and somebody else’s. It means trying as hard as you can to stay away from mindless consumption, automated behaviors, rationalizations. It means that to act well you first have to know and care. In my neighborhood, children at the local middle school might learn about the importance of saving the rain forest, but as they walk to school, do they know a single tree by name? The reason I suspect they don’t is that some of them wince when I look up from my garden bed to say hello, unsure whether to return the greeting or keep looking at their shoes. There is an invisible tie between our knowledge of, and love for, the earth on which we tread, and those we keep for the neighbors with which we cross path. 

We in America are in large measures uprooted and restless, overfed, under-loved, over-medicated, and entertained to death. To all of this there is no ‘systemic’ solution whatsoever. No policy, no campaign, no banner, will change anything. The only way out lays in choosing small, in living and loving on a very small, knowable scale. In cherishing our corner of dirt, birds, friends, spouse, and resident stranger. In refusing to buy more plastic sh*t or read another Tweet. In being stubbornly tender and staying stubbornly put. I used to think of my homebirths, homeschool and general obsession with home-making as signs that I liked to take care of things myself instead of paying someone to do them for me—Old fashioned self-reliance, if you will. But now I believe these choices are my own quiet, one-woman revolution against the Rational Mind that has made the world flat, the soil thin, and the neighborhood kids aloof.