“Manifesto: The Mad FarmerLiberation Front” by Wendell Berry
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Because this is a vision of life that embraces humility and patience,Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are to be harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.*
* Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad FarmerLiberation Front,” in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), pp. 87-88. As quoted in Walsh, Brian J. and Keesmaat, Sylvia C., Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 178. See the entire Wendell Berry Poem here.