By PETER SCHUTT
12/14/2014
I just finished watching a segment on 60 Minutes about meditation and mindfulness, which apparently is sweeping the country as the next new thing. Of course, Google was featured as the model corporation offering meditation seminars to its employees; Google actually has its own “guru” whose job is to inculcate employees with the skill of “being in the moment”.
The TV segment was centered around the philosophy of Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction). He is an author and leader of seminars, having practiced meditation for many years. But unlike many self-help teachers who make their living spreading their version of The Gospel, Mr. Zinn issues a forthright caveat: If you think that learning meditation and mindfulness is one more thing you need to do, then don’t do it. It is not something you do – being in the moment is a way of living, he said.

So what does this have to do with Winchester Farm, or any farm, for that matter?

Wendell Berry made a wise observation on post-Industrial, urban American culture. City living, he points out, has brought about a lifestyle that revolves around convenience and leisure. Americans in particular, not longer do any physical work in the outdoors. No work that involves physical exertion at all. So these days, people go to fitness centers (if they can afford it or there’s one conveniently located), or they simply go running down one of our busy asphalt byways. And so on.
This, Berry opines, amounts to treating your body like your dog – taking it out for exercise so that it can return to its favorite pasttime – enjoying leisure in its most modern form.

Working on a farm (and here I speak of a farm in its purest sense – caring for the land and what’s in it and on it, as opposed to senselessly extracting what can be extracted from it) is, by definition, “being in the moment”. A farmer, to be a good farmer, must be mindful in every moment, and the farmed land actually makes this mindfulness very simple. Being in nature really is meditation; the sights, sounds, smells and textures of the outdoors make it almost impossible to NOT be in the moment.

To be a farmer requires love of the land, so much so, that Berry says (and I agree) it takes at least one lifetime to get to know the intricacies of a farm of a few tens of acres.

By contrast, being immersed in a strictly urban life brings with it the love of money. This goes in utter contradiction to good farming, which has its own economy outside what we all know as the money economy. With the love of money comes, by necessity, the fear of not having enough of it. Fear, of course, produces anxiety which produces disease – physical, mental and spiritual. Utterly everywhere we turn today, we see with our eyes and hear with our ears, something about “the economy”. Tragically, this has completely separated people from the natural order of things.
And so, when we are separated from nature, in my opinion we then surrender out natural ability to be “in the moment” or “mindful”.

I applaud the well-intended folks like Mr. Zinn and others who are trying to enlighten people who are in such straits that they struggle to be in the moment. The practice of meditation is clearly important in our mixed up world. But even more so is the good work of farming, where the love of money is easily forgotten.
As the Amish say, when a man is working the soil, he is as close to God as he can get.