Autumn, and the Stage of the Cycle

<

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground;
And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knows not how*.
For the earth brings forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.
But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest is come.

.

(Mark 4.26-9)

.

.

.

And so it is, harvest time, for the farmer, and for the farmer of history. True harvesters know, it’s the Earth which produces of itself, a gift of grace, while we then must work to guide this grace to become our daily bread.

.

This I say for those who understand, and who wish to understand. And it is said against those who think they can substitute artificial idols for the Earth’s abundance, and who impose slavery in the name of liberation from honest, fruitful work. They yearn to justify their self-chosen exile from the Earth. They call this exile prosperity, they experience it as luxury and illness. God knows theirs as the sins of pride, greed, lust, gluttony, envy, sloth, and anger. The Earth knows them as destroyers, parasites, and squatters.

.

Bread from stone? They offer grapes of thorns, figs of thistles. Their tree is corrupt and brings only evil fruit (Matthew 7:16-20). They do nothing but poison the grace of the Earth, and put a tax on that which the Earth gives for free.

.

By their fruits you shall know them.

.

They command the stones to become bread, and they claim to succeed. It’s really a game of smoke and mirrors; don’t be deceived.

.

As always, there’s only the free grace of the Earth, and our humanly midwives’ role.

.

Thus we are the salt of the earth. But we must keep our savor (Matthew 5:13).

.

Hail to the Autumn, the harvest, the bounty, the grace. And let us prepare the fields, for the Winter which must interpose, and the Spring where we must weed, dig, sow. Our Summer soon will be with us.

.

.

.

*And yet through our work and the supplement of science we have come to know. We understand ecology and agroecology. Here too, those who echo Satan’s sneer about bread-from-stone have nothing but the lie. In the same way they wish to impose slavery in the name of freedom from work, so in the name of science they strive to suppress science. They shall fail and lament.

.

.

.

Labor Day; Or, Sufficient Unto the Day is the Good and the Evil Thereof

>

Our true work expresses our humanity. We who are still able to perform our fruitful work thus retain this portion of the human birthright. But we who have been forcibly sundered from our human work and forced to “work” for an alien institution have been robbed of our birthright.

.

Therefore we who have the honor and the misfortune, we who have been fated to live in this time of the worst perversion of the human endeavor and the most confused divergence from the true path of history, face a twofold work requirement.

.

We must, as ever, do our human duty, fulfill our human responsibility, perform our human work. But today the core element of our work is the work of rejecting and resisting the false “work” of Mammon, of commodity production, of globalized false “trade”, of corporate rule. This false work, this false buying and selling, is nothing but selling our souls and the purchase of perdition, enslavement, death.

.

How have we come to this dead end? Mythology says we fell from the Garden of Eden and have been cursed with the need to toil ever since. The forces of evil have sought power over our very toil, turning us into slaves either directly in the formal sense or by monopolizing access to work and controlling the modes of work, so that only as robots can we function in the world of “work”.

.

Worse, although this exile was a primal sundering and alienation from the source of our being and soul, the gravid Earth, we have been taught falsely to view this exile as a journey toward freedom, toward prosperity, toward knowledge and transcendence. Never has a more obscene Orwellian inversion been performed than this version of “Slavery is Freedom” which has been shouted from every false pulpit for thousands of years, and never with greater omnipresence and volume than in the modern today, the moment of fossil fuels.

.

The myth really means the exact opposite. Adam and Eve were organic and ecological in the Garden. They were integrated, elemental, primal. They lived as the lilies of the field. But Satan seduced them to desire the alleged knowledge which would make them as gods. Thus they broke the unity, broke the integration. The Original Sin was scientism itself. The original curse was the sundering of humanity from nature, the exile, the alienation.

.

Since then this same Satan has taught us to believe we must replace the primal foraging and horticulture, living with the lilies in the Garden, with the gruesome and destructive toil of industrial agriculture and its epigones in every economic, political, and cultural sector. Destructive of the Earth, destructive of our bodies, destructive of our souls.

.

Jesus echoes this as he speaks to the multitudes in the Sermon on the Mount:

.

Matthew 6:24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink; nor yet for your body, what you shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?

27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

28 And why take you thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, How shall we be clothed?

32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: ) for your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things.

33 But seek you first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

.

The meaning and truth of this is unchanged if you remove “God” and replace him with “the Earth”. Even the most fundamentalist secularist must make the same choice between faith in the Earth’s natural bounty or faith in the godhood of the engineer’s technology to render what he calls the sterility of the earth fertile. The natural fruit is truth, the artificial is a lie. This is the same truth and lie confronted by every religion, including the religion of scientism and technocracy. So make no foolish distinction between modern “enlightenment” and medieval darkness. All modes of thought have equal potential for light or dark, depending upon how they embrace the truth of ecology or the lies of Mammon and technocracy.

.

The same is true of Jesus’ injunction to his disciples, as he sends them out to minister:

.

Matthew 10:9 Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses,

10 Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat.

Mark 6:8 [He] commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a staff only; no scrip, no bread, no money in their purse:

9 But be shod with sandals; and not put on two coats.

.

These injunctions are addressed to all of us as well. We all need “take nothing”. If we lived in truth, true scientific knowledge, and moral good faith, this plus the agroecological bounty would feed us beyond all hopes of prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness. These passages refer to the true reclamation, healing the sundering breach and restoring humanity’s earthly connection. This is the true redemption and reunification. Agroecology and Food Sovereignty offer the promise of this revolution and restoration.

.

The true restoration and reclamation process is to be and live as ecologically as possible, in mind, soul, and action. Expelled, we can still work in harmony with the Earth. This is the true imitation of the life in the Garden, and is also the embodiment of the true science. Agroecology is the process of rendering agriculture and all of life more holistic, more organic, more integrated. Only through agroecology and its equivalents in every context can we overcome the alienation, imitate the Garden of Eden, and present our work to God, history, or reason, however we envision, as proving we’ve learned the lesson, and in any case come as close as we can to paradise on Earth.

.

This does not mean lack of work, or especially lack of joy in the work we do for our own people. Rather, it means working only to guide Earth’s great abundance, to bring Earth’s profligate bounty, itself a free gift of the Earth itself, to a fruition most fruitful for a humanity who also is of the Earth and restores Earth even as we eat of it. The true productive work is the work of tending the natural abundance.

.

Unfortunately the great projects of humanity which sought to provide guidance for this endeavor have lost their way, have betrayed humanity and the Earth. Organized religions have become beholden to Mammon and abdicated their spirit, while “leftist” secular politics also completely embraced the demon of productionism and commodification, thus nullifying itself as a possible way forward for humanity. Thus we have the malign twin truths, God is Dead and Politics is Dead. Each has been swallowed up by the demons of scientism and the corporate person. Each has been swallowed up in death.

.

Today the propaganda of the beast resounds as if from the heavens, its signal boosted infinitely by the corporate media omnipresence. We see how it offers its false decadent lying substitute for the aspirations of faith. The accursed “Feed the World” theology is a false version of grace from on high requiring no works. But in truth this false grace is 100% contingent upon the works of Mammon, meaning that one must undergo the ritual of paying money.

.

Thus Mammon’s grace is the grace of being born rich, while the works it imposes upon the rest of us comprise the constant practice of the money ritual, procuring money and disposing of money. All human activity at both ends, producing (being allowed to rent a “job”) and consuming (total dependency upon the ritual “purchase” from a mysterious source), must be mediated through these ritual religious works.

.

Contrast the promise of Food Sovereignty, the true feeding of body and soul, where we the people feed ourselves out of the righteousness of our human work, no Mammon, no contingency, only our free work for ourselves, our families, our communities. This is the true grace.

.

Therefore let our holiday give all respect to the righteous who do the necessary work, conscientiously, in good faith. But let it also teach us that under the rule of Mammon most of the work is unnecessary, most is imposed by force, by circumstance of the Fall. What’s more, gratuitously even by the lights of the Fall, Mammon forces commodity production, productionism for its own destructive and tyrannical sake. Secularists call this “capitalism”, though it is veritably a religion. The world is as suffused with religion as ever. It is merely, temporarily, in the clutches of the most malign, destructive, benighted religions of Mammon and scientism.

.

Do you want to produce food for human beings, or commodities and poison for corporate “persons”, a kind of demon? True work is the former, false perverted work the latter. The same is true in every other economic sector. Indeed never has the very idea of food been so laden with symbolic religious significance as it has become in this modern age, because this is the most religious age of all. Food is literally and spiritually the core battleground and ground zero for the whole of the great climactic struggle for the soul of humanity, the realization of the future, the very existence of the past, and the question of whether there shall ever, in the present, be freedom and fulfillment. The time has come where the only true work is the work of this great crisis.

.