Book Highlight: The Mad Farmer Poems by Wendell Berry

I'm coming back to The Mad Farmer Poems more and more these days. Maybe my age is finally catching up to my temperament, creating a perfect alignment of the curmudgeon molecules down in my core. Lately, I have found myself having a harder and harder time just going along to get along with the inane and the insane. So for all of you that grimace at the news, smirk at your emails, and perpetually roll your eyes so much at meetings that it makes you nauseous...go find some solace in the poems of the Mad Farmer.

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"I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it...
Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way."
                        -  The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

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"By the excellence of his work the workman is a neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise to own, the salesman is a neighbor. ​By selling what is good his character survives the market."
                                                                                                    -  Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer

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"To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart."
                                                                                                   -  The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment

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"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.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
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 millennium. Plant sequoias."
          - Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

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"As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection."
​          - Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

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"Come all ye conservatives and liberals
who want to conserve the good things and be free,
come away from the merchants of big answers,
whose hands are metalled with power;
from the union of anywhere and everywhere
by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
from the union of work and debt, work and despair;
from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.
From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
secede into care for one another and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth."
         -  The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union