Amish envy

I don’t really understand the Amish. Why they choose to live such a labor intensive life when technology offers them an easier and more efficient way is beyond me. Maybe it stems from a dishonesty guilt trip they feel when they say horsepower, but refer to engine power—because what honest man could ever say one thing and mean another?

“Are you enjoying your reading?”
“Oh yeah. I'm learning a lot about manure. Very interesting.”

Despite my lack of understanding of the Amish, I envy them a bit, because with all the hands-on work they do in building their own homes, harvesting their own land and farming their own animal products, they must have a better understanding of the law of the harvest (you reap what you sow) and they probably have more solid patience than I do.

“I should tell you, this kind of coat doesn't have buttons. See? Hooks and eyes.”
“Something wrong with buttons?”
“Buttons are proud and vain, not plain.”
“Got anything against zippers?”

I didn’t grow up wearing plain clothes without buttons. I live in an age and a culture where so many things are given to us as soon as we want them. If postal mail isn’t fast enough for you, use electronic mail; if you don’t want the burden of wandering around town to find a pay phone, why not carry a cell phone in your pocket; sick and tired of being sick and tired? Here, try our new fast acting, long lasting, non-drowsy relief medicine.

“Give me the maximum allowable dosage: find out what will kill me, then back it off a little.”

There are very few things in life that teach us to be patient or to cultivate what we have in faith that it will one day become what we want. I think gardening would be a good teacher of such a lesson. The idea of caring for a plant, of nurturing it from a seed until it matures and either gives fruit or provides beauty—I think it would provide a lot of parallels to how we should approach things in life.

“I sold the cow for some magic beans.”
“BEANS? Wah!”
“But Donald, these aren't ordinary beans, they're magic beans! If you plant these beans in the light of a full moon, do you know what'll happen?”
“Yes! They grow more beans!”

The only experience I’ve had with plants have been the 3rd grade class project I did with Shane Rehberg where the whole class was to plant six pea plants and water them for 6-8 weeks (ours were all dead after 10 days), and a plant I keep on my desk at work—its called a “mother-in-law’s tongue” (it was a gift). Plants like it are called “succulents” which essentially means it’s the kind you don’t have to water all the time. When I first got it, I tried watering once a week but that was killing it, so I haven’t touched it for three months and it looks great. What kind of life lessons can you draw from that?!

I mention this because, at this point in my life, the only struggle I have to face is bachelorhood—which, in Mormon culture, is the equivalent to the celibate life of a monk. Of coarse, my frustrations come not (just) from the fact that I’m not having sex, but I live a lone, and I really wish I had a best girl to come home to, to share my thoughts with instead of just posting them on a blog assuming someone out there cares enough to read them.

“Ya can't live with 'em, ya can't live without 'em.”
“There's something irresistablish about 'em.”

I don’t regret not being married—I’ve never met anyone I wish I were married to, but that is the source of my frustration. How can a guy live for 25 years and not find even one girl he wishes he had for his own (or at least a girl he liked so much that the wish stayed with him long enough to actually marry the girl). I feel helpless to resolve it, and I feel like the powers that be aren’t putting much effort toward it either.

My concerns today aren’t on the source of my frustration but on my reaction to it. If I truly am helpless to the situation, shouldn’t I just be content to hold my ground until those who can change something about it do? I think that an agricultural analogy would explain it better. However, I’ve never farmed corn, so most of what I say about what the farmer’s practices are is a guess—again we see another of the many disadvantages I suffer from not being raised Amish.

“Is this heaven?”
“No, it’s Iowa.”

Take a stalk of corn. Let’s assume that it’s greatest desire in life is to fill the measure of its creation and produce ears of corn. It begins in spring as a seed and is watered and fertilized until it shoots up out of the ground. The gardener continues to water and fertilize it as it grows from a seedling to a stalk. By early summer it reaches its full stature and the gardener discontinues his daily care for the plant and leaves it to the elements until it is ready to be harvested.

The young stalk now goes for weeks in the summer heat without a watering, the only hydration he receives anymore is from the sparse summer rain. With no additional fertilizer to enrich the surrounding soil, our poor stalk is left to consume what’s left in the soil and hope it sees him through the season. The naïve corn stalk doesn’t know everything about farming, but he knows enough about himself to know that he’s always needed fertilizer, so it only makes sense that once he’s exhausted the nourishment from the soil around him, he’ll need to pull up his roots and relocate to a plot with richer soil—how else could he ever hope to meet the farmer’s expectations and sprout some corn?

“Morgan, this crop [circle] stuff is just about a bunch of nerds who never had a girlfriend their whole lives. They're like thirty now. They make up secret codes and analyze Greek mythology and make secret societies where other guys who never had girlfriends can join in. They do stupid crap like this to feel special. It's a scam. Nerds were doin' it twenty five years ago and new nerds are doing it again.”

But as we all know, the stalk doesn’t uproot himself (or maybe the few dumb ones do and that’s why we have inexplicable crop circles), but he stays put, trusting that the farmer wants to see him render ears of corn as badly as he wants to himself. He has faith that if his crop of corn were at risk, that the farmer would return and set things straight. Meanwhile, he just stays in place, waiting in anticipation for the day that the first sign of a husk shoots from his stem.

The summer is long and dry and hot. Anyone wiser would have uprooted long ago in search of a damp patch of fertile soil shaded from the relentless summer sun, but the corn stalk stays, because that’s where the farmer planted him.

I know enough about plants to know that as much as they need water and fertile ground, they also need lots of sunlight, because it’s the sunlight that makes photosynthesis possible. Perhaps, what the calm farmer knows that the frantic corn stalk doesn’t is that fertilizer in the soil isn’t the only way for him to feed. Sure that’s how he’s done it since he was a seed, but now that he’s grown he’s got chloroplasts in his skin, and when the sun hits those babies they’ll provide more nourishment than anyone could ever dream of getting from cow poop mixed into the dirt.

“The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for givin’ me the things I need: the sun, the rain, and the apple seed. Yes, He is good to me.”

Like our young corn stalk, I’m at that point in my life where the watering and the fertilizing are over and I’m on my own, right in the middle of summer. I really do believe that the gardener wants what’s best for me, but sometimes I narrow-mindedly wonder if he’s forgotten that I’m here.

Sometimes I get panicky and want to uproot to that damp shady spot—I could stand marrying her, or I could put up with that for the rest of my life if I had to. But, I’ll bet if I do settle it would just end up in divorce, because how many cobs of corn have you eaten that have come from self-uprooting stalks?

Are my expectations too high? Am I doing something wrong? No. If so the farmer would make a visit. I’d feel guilty instead of lost. Remorse instead of discouragement—because, after all, being left alone to face the strong summer winds isn’t a condemnation, but a preparation—it provides the resistance needed to strengthen and anchor your roots, so when the winds have ceased and the corncobs begin to sprout you’ll be strong enough to handle their weight.

And one shouldn’t compare himself to others who have married young and effortlessly, because it takes a completely different approach to farm full ears of corn than it does that baby corn people serve in salads and at cocktail parties.

“Nice story, Mr. Dickens.”
“Oh, thanks. If you liked this, you should read the book.”

See Job 4-6.