Speaking of farm, so I read-- last week you were telling me about this big New Yorker profile of Wendell Berry. So I went on your recommendation, and I read it. I had to read in the Physical Magazine, because Wendell Berry-- you got to read a Wendell Berry thing in physical form.

And that's really interesting. Really interesting. I mean, I knew about Berry, but it was interesting to hear, more of a long form description of what his life was like. The thing that caught my attention is that he is a purified instantiation of this deep life philosophy that we talk about on the show.

I don't know if you had the same reaction, but think about it. This is someone who said, I'm going to do exactly what's at the core of our notion of the deep life, which we talk about in our core idea video on the deep life, if people aren't familiar.

So YouTube page, core idea video on the deep life. We talk about this. But at the core of the deep life is making radical change to your life to put it into alignment with the things that you value. And that's what Berry did. I mean, he moved-- he left New York to move to a farm in Kentucky near where he grew up to cultivate land with horses while teaching at a local college there.

Built his entire life around incredibly intentionally, here are the things I value, community, connection to land, these older ways of living, the idea of writers having a-- being cited in a particular place and context from which they write about, as opposed to, as he talks about, just being in this cosmopolitan abstraction where you live in a city and are of no place.

And he did all those things and built a really unusual life around it. But it sounds cool. I don't know what your-- was your thought-- my thought was, this sounds like kind of a cool life he built out there. Well, a couple of things. I mean, you read one of his books in the past month.

I think it was January or December or something like that. So I hadn't heard of him until you were explaining in the book that you read about him. And then he came up here. And he's a prolific writer. He's written a ton of stuff. I mean, he's probably like 80-something years old.

And he's written nonstop for-- Nonstop. --for 50 years. Poems, novels, essays, and nonfiction books. And he's a professor, was a professor, and a farmer. But they have no technology. Didn't have a computer. They weren't on the internet. He wasn't on phone. So maybe it tells you something about you're up at dawn to tend your horses, even if you have a teaching job.

You have a lot of time to write. He lives in a town of 60 people, something like that. Yeah. And he's related to half of them. Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you the big revelation of the article for me was his writing shed. I hadn't heard about that before, that he has this house.

It's overlooking a river. Not a house. It's like a little cabin up on pillars, because I guess the river overflows. No electricity, no running water. And he goes out there, and he writes. And he's out there, and he writes. But I love, in this piece, but also in the book of essays I read, how he knows the land, and he has a connection to it.

And he wanders the land and canoes on his river and is completely connected to his town in that particular place. And now his family, multiple generations now, a lot of them all live around there. And in the article, his daughter and his granddaughter would just wander into their house.

It really looks like a great case study of the deep life in action. Figure out what matters to you. Reorient your life around that, as opposed to arbitrary metrics that are nice in the moment or seem just culturally palatable, like just going up the ladder in a career or just seeking distraction.

And then be willing to make radical changes. And what's more radical than leaving a teaching, writing job in New York and move to Kentucky? Speaking of which, you do a good job of explaining the radical part, because it's important to do-- you explain it like there being some sort of a test before you do that.

Because then you gave the example of the one fellow who, in your book, who went to become a monk and didn't really work out. So I think for new listeners, it's good to explain that briefly, just so they don't think that you jump into the radical part. Yeah, radical is important, but it has to be aligned with your values.

So you have to make-- if you really want to live deeply, ultimately, you want to make some sort of radical shift, because that signals to yourself that you take this really seriously. It makes it an adventure. And it allows you to really immerse yourself in that value. So if Wendell had just said, I work in New York, but I live in northern New Jersey, but a little bit south, so I have a little bit of a plot of land.

And I really have a nice garden that I take care of, because I find land really important. And I take the commuter train into New York and work in New York. That's not the same thing as I'm using horses to plow land in Kentucky. And there's something about the radicalness of what's important.

That's the immersion in the value. You can make the value that you're orienting towards a guiding direction for your life. But radical without prep becomes just change for the sake of enjoying the disruption, and that can fade out. So you're right. It's so good they can't ignore you. I talk about the guy who says, I'm going to go become a monk.

And he's in Mountain Monastery, and he gets there, and is like, oh, all right, this is not immediately making my life better. And why exactly am I doing this other than the fact it's disruptive? And he gave up on that. I talked about in the video where we explained the deep life from that Core Ideas playlist, the Mark Fredenfaller, where they moved to that island in the South Pacific.

And it's because of disruption. You're like, hey, it's radical. Change is radical. It's something to do. And they're like, oh, this is terrible. And we feel weird about it. And our kids have lice. And they got ringworm. And it was like, this is not great. And they couldn't open the coconuts.

This is another thing I didn't leave out. They imagined themselves just cracking open the coconuts. And it turned out it's really hard to open coconuts. And they're like, this is terrible. Why did we do this? And then he went back and did make a radical change, rebuilt his whole life around DIY, and started a new magazine, and getting back in touch with building things with his hands.

So that's actually the real story. So I think it's a really important point, is that you have to do something radical, really, if you're going to embrace the deep life. But it has to be very much oriented towards things that are valuable to you. You have to know why you're making that particular radical change.

And there's a lot of self-insight involved there. And that would be fascinating, to really be a fly on the wall with Wendell Berry in his 20s, when he's trying to figure this out and trying to convince his wife, this is what we need to do. A couple of things that come to mind.

One, the article was written by the daughter of his first editor, who has since passed. But that was kind of cool to see the interchange of that throughout the story. It was a long article. And then talking about what he was like when he was younger, there was a quote in there where someone was like, did you tell him to lighten up?

I think he was pretty intense. Yeah, his book seemed to be pretty polemical. His nonfiction work can be pretty polemical. And his new book, he's writing a book as an 80-something-year-old on racism. So that's going to be interesting, I think. Two other-- yeah, I think it will be for sure.

I don't think he cares. He's like, whatever. What did he say? He said, I'm 80. I have friends. I have family. I don't care if people are mad at me. And so I'll read it. I think it'll be interesting. Thoughtful guy. He's written about that in the past. And I think that he's thought a lot about it.

Yeah, he did a lot of writing about the Civil Rights Movement and trying to understand it as a movement and compare and contrast it to other movements. I don't remember the punchline, but I know he had some pretty provocative essays in the book I read that was comparing and contrasting the Civil Rights Movement to the environmental movement.

So he thinks a lot about movements and how they expand. I mean, one of his main critiques, if I remember, is the problem with movements is there's a certain place where his real worry, which I think seems really relevant today, but his real worry is when movements get separated from personal action.

So he talks about the environmental movement. And he's like, what matters is you're in a place actually stewarding the land in that place and building up from personal experience a respect for land and its interaction with humans. What he worries about is that you say, no, no, I just live in suburban America, and I give money to these groups that are trying to influence legislation.

Or today it would be-- and he's talked about this probably more recently-- I tweet about things or change my Twitter profile or whatever. And he says these movements become professionalized and abstracted. And they're identity badges. I'm a part of this movement. I wear the right thing. I say the right things.

No action actually happens. And my memory is when he was talking about the Civil Rights Movement, the degree to which I guess this was cited in personal action. You were out there sitting at the lunch counters or this or that. And so I think he was lamenting about the environmental movement.

But I think it's a big thing today that social media gives you the ability to superficially be connected with movements. But it also accelerates the abstraction of these movements into just components of an identity presentation. And there feels like there's a lot of crackling energy. But that energy is not being conduited into actually any sort of motive force.

And so actually, yeah, I think this book will be interesting. Interesting guy. There was a cool part in the book where he was talking about the difficulty of writing. He's like, yeah, writing's hard. And then he gave the story about when he goes out to change the wires at night and it's cold.

And he started doing the work. And then it was getting better. And then he related that to writing and getting into the groove. And yeah, if you're a farmer, you're used to hard work. Yeah, writing's hard work. Yeah. That's always my thing is what writer's block is another way of describing what it feels like to write.

Because it's a weird, unnatural thing you're asking your brain to do. So why are you rewarded for doing it well is because you're able to overcome that. So the difficulty should be the first thing that you expect. But anyways, I think we'll see more of Barry-style lifestyles potentially in this current post-pandemic period where people are reinventing their lives and becoming disillusioned with what life was like pre-pandemic and having the disruption give them the space to think about it.

That's a direction I think a lot of people should consider, which is this hardcore deep life direction. Radical changes to align your life with your values. You have to know what you value, be very careful about that, but then make the changes radical. So don't do radical for the sake of radical.

You should be very aligned clearly with your values. And why not? I mean, Barry did it. He has an interesting life out there. So I think we need to move this podcast to a farm. I want video. We should be on horses. I think we should be on horses as we do the podcast.

Here's an AV challenge for our contractors. We want to record this podcast from horses. We're just sort of walking over our land and sort of chatting about life. We can do that the 201st episode because the 200th episode will-- We're going to South Africa. Yeah. And then after our treatment for black mamba venom, we'll go to a farm.

We'll do this from a farm, and then we'll get the next headline. Minor podcaster hilariously bit by mamba in South Africa, immediately trampled by horses on farm, ruining the land and the financial future of the landowner, Wendell Barry, who has now been forced to move to New York to become a TikTok influencer in hopes of salvaging his waning fortune.

It's a long headline. And he couldn't pack his typewriter. Yeah, couldn't pack his typewriter. So now is using virtual reality goggles and living mainly in the metaverse. And it's all going to happen. It's a long headline. The headlines are long these days. You have to-- because you've got to pack a lot of information into them.

Oh, well. All right. Well, enough of that nonsense. We got calls today, right? So we got to-- Yeah, we got some good calls. Listener call episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)