Chapter 2

       North

       THE NURTURING GENERATIVE ADULT

      If we will have the wisdom to survive,

      to stand like slow-growing trees

      on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…

      then a long time after we are dead

      the lives our lives prepare will live

      here, their houses strongly placed

      upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

      rich in the windows. The river will run

      clear, as we will never know it,

      and over it, birdsong like a canopy….

      On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

      the old forest, an old forest will stand,

      its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

      The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

      Families will be singing in the fields.

      In their voices they will hear a music

      risen out of the ground….

      Memory,

      native to this valley, will spread over it

      like a grove, and memory will grow

      into legend, legend into song, song

      into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

      the songs of its people and its birds,

      will be health and wisdom and indwelling

      light. This is no paradisal dream.

      Its hardship is its possibility.

       — WENDELL BERRY, “A VISION”

      If you’ve ever felt truly privileged to provide for or care for another being, human or otherwise, even yourself, or if you’ve ever translated an inspiration or vision into art or song, or into a manuscript, an invention, or a community project, then you’ve experienced and taken pleasure in the wholehearted and clearheaded qualities of your Nurturing Generative Adult. If you’ve ever dedicated yourself to the renewing and enriching of a ruined place — a clear-cut forest, a polluted river, or an overgrazed prairie — or rolled up your sleeves and volunteered to serve families or neighborhoods, then you’ve had a firsthand relationship with the North facet of your Self. If you’ve ever acted in defense of an oppressed people or an endangered species, spoken truth to power without desire for personal gain, or occupied public space in support of true democracy, then you’ve known your North Self in masterly action.

      To nurture is to care for the well-being of other humans, our fellow creatures, Earthly habitats, and ourselves. To be generative is to design and implement innovative cultural practices that imaginatively and effectively restore, solve, or shelter, that truly serve the whole person and the web of life (endeavors in education, for example, or governance or healing). To be an adult, in this sense, is to enthusiastically and competently embrace opportunities to enhance the vitality of beings, places, and communities, present and future — and, where you don’t find such opportunities, to creatively generate them.

      Every human is born with the capacity to be abundantly nurturing and generative. Some find it easy and natural to develop and embody this aspect of our humanity. Others experience it as awkward and challenging. But learning to embody the North facet of the Self is always an essential dimension of becoming fully human. We foster wholeness in ourselves when we contribute to the wholeness of something greater than ourselves.

      Wendell Berry is a prolific author, an eloquent critic of our culture and economies, and a fifth-generation Kentucky farmer. In his poem that begins this chapter, he offers a vision of the many generations of hard work awaiting us this century and beyond, the labor necessary to restore the land and waters and engender healthy human communities existing in harmony and synergistic partnership with the greater Earth community. The Nurturing Generative Adult is an essential facet of the Self needed to accomplish this demanding and joyous work. Wendell Berry is an inspiring role model of a mature human with a well-developed North.

      Thomas Berry — no immediate blood relation to Wendell — was a cultural historian, a Christian monk, and one of our leading twentieth-century environmental thinkers. At age eleven, Thomas ventured out for the first time behind his family’s new home in North Carolina. It was late May. He came to a creek, crossed it, and there beheld an astonishing meadow covered with blooming white lilies and filled with song. Writing seventy years later, he reflects,

      A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky….

      …Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation a well