2 January

Million Acres: The Winter Pasture

by Jon Katz
The winter pasture. Million acres

I set out today to photograph the winter pasture, with my Canon camera and a 14 mm wide angle fish-eye lens, and I came across Million Acres farm in Salem, N.Y., where I once stopped and met the dog Nixon (he had another name as well), and I stopped and loved this image of the winter pasture, spread out under a riveting sky. For once, I had the right lens.

These photos have heartache for me, as well as joy. Rural areas everywhere are dying, farmers losing their farms and their way of life to the new economy that frightens people, gives them bad jobs or takes them away. Our rural communities are broken, lost in the new theories of economists and corporations. So I feel a strong compulsion to photograph them while I can, and find solace in the notion that one day, people will look at these photos and recall what they allowed to be lost, so that they can live better at Wal-Mart.

2 January

Farm Stand, 2. What are people for?

by Jon Katz
Our bond

Farm stand, Route 22, White Creek, N.Y.

“Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange

of my life and work for yours, so much for so much

of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are –

that puts us in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on

discovering we are more together than we thought?

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,

and you are the known place to which the unknown is always

leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,

I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing

not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing

a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only

accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light

enough to live, and then accepts the dark,

passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I

have fallen time and again from the great strength

of my desire, helpless, into your arms.”

– Wendell Berry.

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