Prepare every needful thing

“Prepare every needful thing” I have heard this saying all my life. And now that I need things that I don’t have it means much more to me than it once did when I was a child hearing it for the first time.

We all prepare all the time whether we realize it or not. Idleness prepares us for nothing. Recreation prepares us for work. Work prepares us for financial blessings. Reading prepares us for thinking. Writing prepares us for learning. The wilderness prepares us for listening. Family living prepares us for society. Traveling prepares us for resting. Planting prepares us for believing. Wanting prepares us for doing.

When my parents taught me to prepare every needful thing we would till the garden and pant seeds of all kinds. We lived in a climate where we could grow many wonderful foods. I especially loved the grapes. We had three varieties of red ones, four yellow, and three blue. a total of about thirty vines. No one knew the names of the varieties they were planted from cuttings years ago and no one remembered the particulars. When they would ripen it was like heaven. I would go sit under the vines and eat until I got sick. What a blessing for a child. Growing up on the farm has shaped my life into the farmer I have become.

Now I sit at a cross road in my life wondering the best way to make a living and keep my heritage as a steward of the land alive in my four children. I think of the hopes of my newly wed days with my wife and the romance and impracticality of farming with Belgian Horses. We loved those years but we made church mice look rich.

I wonder now if we are again  caught up in the delusion of romantic yeomanry. Through history we read of the people of the land leaving for the cities. Were they pushed out? Were they enticed? Were they wrong to go? I will not yield.  The land is all I know. The land is my first love. My ever giving neighbor and my companion. I have been taught by the soil, mentored by her, trained in her care and her protection. My fathers came to this land ten generations ago. They brought the name DeMille  with them and always they have tended the earth, and been blessed by her. Who am I to think I can break this link of strong tradition. I must teach my children her secrets, her unspoken stories, her songs of the seasons, her giving gifts and the fury in her storms. They must learn her melancholy story in the autumn breeze. They must hear the tale in the spring brooklet of the melting snow. I must share with them the stories of their mothers long in the grave who toiled with forks in the hay beside their husbands in the meadow. I shall walk with them in the path through the canyons where the timbers were harvested and hewn with ax and brawn to prepare for winters snow. It is my link in the generations of time to sit quietly and listen to the whisper of the mountain pines with my little ones and know that my people once heard this sacred moment and loved one another as we share love between us. I shall listen as the wind shuffles the grass and I will hear a message of encouragement while I hold the hand of my fair headed daughter. The things I need are all about me. My preparation is within my heart. I seek the learning and the wisdom of my fathers. I am fearful for the fate of my grandchildren. The land may be lost to them. The link of yeomanry may be wearing thin and the earth may heal with a long winter. But who shall know her ways again?  We must protect her, heal her and bless her with our caring ways.

My mind is filled with obsession over the loss of my relationship with the earth. My attachment with the farm and my family often seems lost to me. I feel lost in this city though I live in the middle or a hundred acre farm. I have little in common with the people in my life. People do not speak of the land with reverence. I am hurt by the apathy and ignorance concerning our mother earth. I am disgusted with the modern earth worshipers, they are sacrilegious in their views.

I need things I do not have to pass on to the next generation. I must prepare every needful thing. I must prepare. I need to purchase a lovely little farm with four seasons. A season of  planting, a season of growing, a season of harvesting, and a season of story telling. I will prepare the ground, prepare the seed, prepare the barn, and prepare the hearth. I will tell the story by the fire to the children, we will till the earth, we will plant the seed, we will cultivate, and we will fill the barn with the bounties of the earth. We will prepare the sweet apple tree, the juice of the peach and I will sit as a happy old man and watch from my porch as a young child sits under the vine and plucks the golden grape and eats until they make themselves sick.