On Sunday Simon and
I played at Hennock Country Fayre. We
were allotted a small gazebo by the main barn where people gathered to eat and
share food, we brought along our PA
system, our instruments, our songs.
We have been living
at Teign Village close by Hennock for a year now. Sharing the cherries from our trees with the
neighbours, taking on an allotment rotivated and turned for us by a local man,
singing at the Strawberry Fair in June and now for the summer shin-dig on the
windy hill above the village.
I am participating
in a sense of ‘community’ - which I’ve read about for so many years in the
pages of Wendell Berry’s essays and poetry books; sharing tools to work on the
land – hoes, spades, entertaining at village functions, raising money for a
local school, setting up a community shop. What does this mean to me? Is it good for me? It feels good. It’s starting to feel like home.
“We have lived our
lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to
live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good
for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn
what is good for it”
Wendell Berry (Kentucky farmer, author and poet)
