I became aware of Wendell Berry in recent years because so many people were telling me that they read his work and thought it was my writing. I wish.

Berry does speak my mind, though, sometimes so eerily that I get a bit of a shiver:

“The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.

Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common – not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. It’s aim is to separate us as far as is possible from the sources of  life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit…

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health – and create profitable diseases and dependences – by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.  In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems.”

– Wendell Berry, “The Art Of The Commonplace.”

I love Berry because he is so eloquent and compelling on the awful partnership between politics and corporatism that is degrading so much of our lives, from media to travel to customer service to health care and jobs and work to the nature of government itself. Got three Berry books and poems today and can’t wait to wade in.