By Love For The Good At Hand We'll Dance Into The Future

July 1, 2009 by David Eggleton

"All the grand and perfect dreams of the technologists are happening in the future, but nobody is there.
 
What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our own being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn?  I think it is love.  [But] I do not mean any kind of abstract love, which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity.  I think that this sort of love defines the effective range of human intelligence, the range within which its works can be dependably beneficent.  Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.
 
Love proposes the work of settled households and communities, whose innovations come about in response to immediate needs and immediate conditions, as opposed to the work of governments and corporations, whose innovations are produced out of the implicitly limitless desire for future power or profit."
 
- Wendell Berry, Standing By Words, 1980 (this version)
 
We're all here, with diferent degrees of security, each choosing next steps again and again.  We all need to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy, but, under prevailing conditions, one or some of those may seem beyond your reach.  Choose not to do without; we all want, and need, you whole and healthy.
 
Take a stand!  Call in genuine terms for immediate, responsive and responsible innovation.  Dance with us; think of woburnite.com as the dance floor.  This is how we can most efficiently rearrange forces and processes to bring appropriate power and profit (i.e. security) to our place and homes.

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