Wendell Berry | Christmas presents are no basis for relationship, love is a practice

I'm recovering from completing my Doctoral dissertation earlier in the week, so I don't have a lot of inspiration for the blog at the moment. Between the book and the dissertation I've pumpled out 350 pages in the last 6 months. My internal inkwell of inspiration is running on empty, so I'm looking forward to switching it up and doing some reading in front of the fireplace.

Here's a re-post of Wendell Berry on Christmas presents:

Just in case you're wondering today if you need to buy one more present for the one's you love in your household, here's a good word from Wendell Berry from the book, "Conversations With Wendell Berry."

People who love each other need to have something they can do for each other, and it will need to be something necessary, not something frivolous. You can't carry out a relationship on the basis of Christmas and anniversary and birthday presents. It won't work.

You have to be doing something that you need help with, and your wife needs to be doing something that she needs help with. You do needful, useful things for each other, and that seems to me to be the way that a union is made...You're being made a partner by your partner's needs and the things that you're required to do to help...Love is not just a feeling; it's a practice, something you practice whether you feel like it or not. If you have a relationship with anybody - a friend, a family member, a spouse - you have to understand the terms of that relationship to do things for those people, and you do them whether you feel like it or not. If you don't it's useless...

This is what you learn as soon as you become a farmer, for instance. Once you get into a relationship with even so much as a vegetable garden, you realize that you have to do the work whether you want to or not. You may have got into it because of love, but there are going to be days when you are sick and you're going to have to do your work anyway. With animals, the work is even more inescapable. There's no way out if you have a milk cow, no reprieve...She makes the milk and you've got to go get it.

Comments

[Keith]

I don't feel like commenting, but hey, here's a comment :-)

[Barbchamberlain]

What beautiful, true words. I'm lucky to be with a partner with whom we have wonderful reciprocity of generosity, to coin a phrase.

What I mean by that: If there's only enough coffee left for one cup and I get there first, I fill his cup. If he gets there first, he fills my cup.

Both of us have thought a great deal about what it takes to succeed in a partnership (both of us having been in less successful ones previously) and we work at it. Not in a laborious way, but in a thoughtful, mindful, deliberate way. Practice, in Berry's terms.

As for gifts, one of the most well-received things we've ever given our younger ones (who were 9 and 12 last Christmas) is an idea some may appreciate.

We made coupons good for various activities: baking cookies together, going ice skating, walking to Manito Park to go sledding, a family games night, and more (some winter activities, some summer).

Some of them involved cash but most didn't. They were gifts of time and attention.

We put each coupon in its own envelope. This made for lots of opening of presents (which still matters to them). Every single coupon was greeted with cries of joy, and not a bit of plastic junk in sight.

After that fun we then had the fun of the actual activities. These were gifts that kept giving all year--and they gave to us as well as to the kids.

[PhredPhidgets]

Somehow I knew you have read the poet an self-described "mad farmer" Wendell Barry Excellent, is this from the book "What are People For?"

[Craig]

I think this particular quote comes from a book called Conversations With Wendell Berry. Thanks for stopping by the blog Fred.