Two Weeks Off, and a Little Wendell Berry

For two weeks each July, CivicLex's office closes to allow our entire team to rest at once. It's genuinely one of my favorite things about my job. I used my break to try to entirely decouple myself from the internet and screens. I read a few books, slept a lot, and tried to wash away the stress with some cold dips in the very cold water of the north Atlantic. It was great!

Coming back to things here at work in Kentucky, I'm feeling energized by returning to this beautiful place and this section of a slightly apochryphal commencement speech by the great Kentuckian Wendell Berry that a friend sent to me. It resonated quite a bit given the work and the times. Find your ideals, and try to hold yourself to them (whatever they may be) even when its hard, even when you have to say no, even when you fail to reach them.

Here it is:

"We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else.

Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made. Put the interest of the community first. Love your neighbors – not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.

Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household – which thrive by care and generosity – and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.

Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well."

Here's a pretty Kentucky pic for you too.