Offering to God

[Guest guest]

>From the poetical work, that I found recently in searching through an old

book shop in the town of Crewkerne, Somerseet, of H.J. Massingham - This

Plot of Earth, 1944...

 

I have no theories about the use of compost. I do not theorise because

because I know by two infallible tests that this is the true and only way

of reaping the fruits of the earth in perpetuity. First by experience; since

I properly organised and regulated the return of all wastes and plant

residues to the soil, the health and prosperity and fecundity of the garden

has changed out of all regocnition. Secondly from the taste of what I eat

from it. I know the difference of taste between food grown by natural and

organic manuring and that grown on artificials, between Natures way and the

way of meodern civilisation. This for me is proof positive that the latter

way is a pernicious delusion and heresey from the way of truth. It is the

way of the father of lies by the pressure of vested interests, and the way

of the death of the soil. I speak strongly because composting is so very

obviously a universal law. The whole of life pivots upon the necissity of

death for ministering to the health and continuity of life, of the katabolic

as the springboard of the anabolic and of decay and decomposition as the

parent of fruitfulness.

Year by year we are disintegrating our soils by the abandonment of good

husbandry for banditry, as our whole civilisation is disintegrating. Unless

we can learn before it is too late to reinterpret our traditions and so to

arrest the dissolution of our ancient culture.

 

 

Yet we who are alive today can think of something worse even than the march

of these devouring dragons over the earth. What but the ailienation both

from earth and from God of the civilisations - Germany by far the worst

example - which have repopulated the world with the dragons of destruction?

Our dealings with the earth have become in a century's intensifying progress

an expanding violence against the earth and bred a separation from it which

ignores both reigious and biological law. Science is as deeply implicated in

this conquest as war and and that economic friction which engenders war.

This lawlessness of man in his violation of both natural and of eternal law

is the real terror of our times. Man must work with nature if he is to

return to God - there is a mystery of association between them which we are

rediscovering from the catastrophe of our double heresey against them.

Therefore I am glad to think of my plot as a clearing from the ancient

forest. By looking upon it as a vocation of husbandry I am repaying a debt

to nature and, I have come to beleive, making an offering to God.