"Husbandry in Heaven"
Nuance is a lost art. We live in binary and have conditioned ourselves to seek a yes or no, an either or. How strange that we never even stop to consider a no-but or a yes-and. This would be too complicated for a culture ensnared in the desire for easy answers and quick fixes. Yet this desire for stark clarity betrays the fundamental reality that life is layered in shades of grey.
Contradiction infuses the essence of living, but we are so quick to do it a disservice in a flippant dismissal. Perhaps we ought to use the more flattering term ‘paradox’ rather than contradiction as contradiction implies the end of the road whereas paradox implies an act of carrying on. To live necessitates death, this is equally as true for the herbivore and carnivore alike. To have or inhabit a space precludes other forms of existence that may otherwise flourish. The act of life is the imposition of a particular kind of order in a specific time and place that, by necessity, will exclude others.
Thus, the opposition of life and death in the mind’s eye necessitate a fuller realization of the consequence of living. Through a small scale agricultural framework we are forced to experience the ultimate ramifications of our decisions in minute and intimate detail instead of segmenting them away. Life, love, and death are strange bed fellows.
Morality is an illusive byword. Justice depends on agency, yet unless one is willing to cut their own journey short, this choice is lacking. Therefore, in any pragmatic terms, the nurturing of sustenance is at once both a moral and an amoral necessity.
The Revelation process of building self-resilience is fraught with emotion and paradox. It is uncomfortable to experience, rather than just consider, that actions have consequences. Sometimes life is zero sum, we can’t have it all, there are definitive winners and losers. All we can do is make sure that those who get the short end get the best short end possible. To borrow a phrase: there’s husbandry in heaven, even in the act of extinguishing a candle.
Contradiction infuses the essence of living, but we are so quick to do it a disservice in a flippant dismissal. Perhaps we ought to use the more flattering term ‘paradox’ rather than contradiction as contradiction implies the end of the road whereas paradox implies an act of carrying on. To live necessitates death, this is equally as true for the herbivore and carnivore alike. To have or inhabit a space precludes other forms of existence that may otherwise flourish. The act of life is the imposition of a particular kind of order in a specific time and place that, by necessity, will exclude others.
Thus, the opposition of life and death in the mind’s eye necessitate a fuller realization of the consequence of living. Through a small scale agricultural framework we are forced to experience the ultimate ramifications of our decisions in minute and intimate detail instead of segmenting them away. Life, love, and death are strange bed fellows.
Morality is an illusive byword. Justice depends on agency, yet unless one is willing to cut their own journey short, this choice is lacking. Therefore, in any pragmatic terms, the nurturing of sustenance is at once both a moral and an amoral necessity.
The Revelation process of building self-resilience is fraught with emotion and paradox. It is uncomfortable to experience, rather than just consider, that actions have consequences. Sometimes life is zero sum, we can’t have it all, there are definitive winners and losers. All we can do is make sure that those who get the short end get the best short end possible. To borrow a phrase: there’s husbandry in heaven, even in the act of extinguishing a candle.