This is My Confession

Wendell Berry says that, especially now, to love a place is to open oneself up to immeasurable heartbreak.

Several years ago, I visited southern Mexico on a delegation committed to studying the roots of migration. I visited a tiny indigenous village in Oaxaca. The old men told me; “We have farmed this land since the time before Christ.” The young people, the few that were left, told me; “There is nothing left for us here. We want to stay, but there is no life left for us.” After thousands of years of farming, U.S. mega-agricultural policies and the effects of global trade like NAFTA had flooded the Mexican market with corn and beans, undercutting small farmers and destroying their way of life. The school had closed in the village—there were no children. And with no children, they had no future. I marked the traces of tears on the old women’s cheeks.  

One young man took us up the mountains to his favorite spot, a place that looked over the land beyond the village. It was beautiful. As I stood there, I felt the lump in my throat grow as I thought of the spot I had used to go to, back home, looking over the land I loved as much as the young man speaking now loved his. And I thought of how the little towns back in my hometown were also losing their young people and their future. I thought of how globalization and the global quest for cheap stuff and bigger profits had also destroyed those towns.

I have come back, back home with that favorite mountain view, to a wreck of an economy and often a general sense of despair. The dominant economy of this part of the world was, ever since the destruction and disappearance of Native villages, industrial. It was a boom and bust timber region, at the mercy of the timber market and the corporations who ran it. But, for a time at least, there was a hidden economy, one based on some sense of community and locality. Small farmers grew food and local craftspeople did their work.

Both economies are now gone. The timber industry crashed. The hidden economy faded away, as Wal Mart and other corporate chains put small “mom and pop” shops out of business and agricultural regulation and consolidation forced farmers to leave their fields fallow. Now, the migrants who fled NAFTA in southern Mexico pick brush or work in the few coastal canneries. Now, the descendants of our first peoples and old loggers alike camp out along the river. Now, farmers age and watch their children leave and their land returns to the forest from whence it came.

My homecoming is also a dirge, a deep sorrow for what might have been, for what has been lost. I grew up farming—canning, preserving, growing food, working in the soil, living off the land. I fumble to re-learn what I once knew. I strain to hear again the voices of the land and forest, the whispers of ancestors and of time before memory.

For now, I trudge into Wal Mart. I participate in an economy almost entirely based on the exploitation of the world’s people, including my own. I am surrounded with a wealth of natural resources, with the wealth of the forest and the streams, and I have forgotten how to live well with it, just as we all have forgotten how to live well with it. Nothing is more tragic than finding deep poverty in the middle of the abundance of the land.

This is my confession. Not only have I forgotten how to live and how to live well; I believed, for so long, the lie that this was the way things were—the way things have to be. That in order to succeed, I had to leave, to find success in the great cities and academies of the world, that everything back home was pedestrian and backwards.

This is my confession. My heart breaks with the stories of pain and loss I hear every day, stories that have touched and wrung my own life in deeply personal ways. My heart breaks when I stand with friends who are sleeping out in the rain and cannot get dry. My heart breaks to hear stories of hatred, when I watch people fighting each other for the limited resources available. My heart breaks to see the level of discouragement, the number of folks who turn to drugs to numb the pain. My heart breaks to see the land neglected and farms empty and Wal Mart a new central gathering space. My heart breaks to see us all swept up in a culture of consumerism in the midst of want, a poverty so terrifying in its implications and consequences as it makes the poor the willing participants of the forces that create poverty.   

This is my confession. To love this place is to open oneself up to heartbreak.

This is my confession. May God forgive me for the evil I have done and the evil done on my behalf.

This is my confession. May God give the grace to re-create and re-member the community of which I am a part.