Northern Farm by Henry Beston

This is a beautiful story of a year of country life on Henry Beston's farm in Maine.  He paints a beautiful picture of the seasons and life and nature on his beloved farm.  He loved and honored this older world and wanted it preserved but knew that this life and man's relationship to nature was quickly becoming a relic.  This book was written in the forties but as I read the ending of the book it reminded me of today.  I wanted to share his closing words with you.

"What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity.  With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man.  Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us.  True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace and the full of human joy."