We are all called to be true to our truth regardless of outcome. The challenge is to be in touch with our very soul and facilitate its’ task on this earth. Sometimes we live our truth at great cost to ourselves and end up misunderstood and apparently defeated. To all those who find this their experience, I hope they find great hope and encouragement in the following poem:
A Vision
If we will have the wisdom to survive
To stand like slow-growing trees
On a ruined place, renewing, enriching it
Then a long time after we are dead
The lives our lives prepare will live
Here, their houses strongly placed
Upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
Rich in the windows. The river will run
Clear, as we will never know it,
And over it, birdsong like a canopy….
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
The old forest, an old forest will stand
Its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots,
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
Risen out of the ground…..
Memory,
Native to this valley will spread over it
Like a grove, and memory will grow
Into legend, legend into song, song
Into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
The songs of its people and its birds,
Will be health and wisdom and indwelling
Light. This is no paradise dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
Wendell Barry “A Vision”
