Murmurings of the Land | Stephen Jenkinson & Nathalie Roy

two things. One of them is that you are making supplication. So there is in it a confession of lack or error or worse. And an acknowledgement of the inability to be self-sufficient probably has to be in there too. What's a mature prayer? That's a really tricky question. Do you pray that people wise up? Do you pray in the teeth of the shitshow of the way it is? Do you just pray that it's not this way when it friggin' is this way? And it being this way is what prompted you to pray in the first place? There you are. Put the water on for me. Okay, let's go do that first. So immense. What's missing in that prayer? It's not missing. This is what makes it prayerful. It is not saying, would you please fix the ratios so my boat is not so small and your sea not nearly as immense. Which of course is what the internet is exactly about. And artificial intelligence is exactly about making the sea smaller and the boat bigger. But in this prayer there is no attempt to re-jig the ratios. It's just case making. It's not complaining. It's not cursing. It's ******* amazing how it withholds it's grievance card. And just says, dude, it's hard. Like, help me. 16 little beautiful ducklings. You like that new coop, huh? I like it. Look at this way today. Yeah, you'll find them. Let's get some hay. You know, the ground is still, but I don't think it's silent. I think it murmurs. We are in a time not quite of utter present hour collapse. But we can see it from here. What's worth doing given that? If you see yourself in this moment as the intended and unintended consequence of things that were undertaken and decided and aborted and all the rest. Seven generations ago, you see yourself mostly as consequence, not agent. How did you happen? Not just your look, your disposition, but the whole crazy thing that coalesced for the moment turned into you. How many threads, how many fibers, how many fractals? If you can do that, you're in the game now, I think. But this requires you have a conscience span of 14 generations, not seven. And you're a conduit for the back and forth rush between them all. That's how you figure out what you should do, I think. We have the origin of the word windfall here. So since yesterday, this one fell. The perfection of apples in the northern climate is something to behold, no? So I'm not saying that the tree's here for me exactly. That would be a fit of real, genuine caprice, I think. I'm just saying that for a while, we're here together. And I've done my part to save the tree from the predations of the deer in the wintertime and the limitations of the sand beneath here. And I imagine in some kind of strange exchange, against the odds, the tree bears fruit and I bear witness. So I love that these are signs, you know? That we haven't entirely blown it. Also, it was a very good year. Those things happen. Good years happen. Yeah, for a while now. Watching these birds come in and out. Making my way. There's that little rosebed that I started. Some of them have survived. Oh, look at you! Rose! Thinking about that big road that corn is taking all the time. To St. Louis, Maine. The hominins, the corn, the rays of the sun. The corn all the way from the south over the mountains, around lakes. You sure they're ready? Ready-ish. The birds are at them pretty good. But these ones are dry. They won't all be ready. Can you take this one? I have to admit, I resent severely the birds taking what I think is more than their portion. I mean severely. I feel strangely paternally protective of the corn. I can't figure that out. I don't feel that way about a zucchini. But corn, roughly the same shape, for some reason, that's what it does to me. So there it is. You bitch, you moan, you groan. You're full of spite. And you feel chided by the thing that's around you, that you chose. And some part of you hopefully, eventually, quiets down enough to say, and that's the way it is. Let me put them in your arm. Here we have some wet delicatessen. Where's your back? That's one. Crisis, the word, is full of warning signs. Now. So we use it as a fait accompli disaster. But for most of its syntactical lifetime, it didn't mean that at all. In fact, our feelings about it weren't a big part of the meaning of the word crisis. That's all they are now. So you can tell from the word, you can hear the word cross, critical. You know that there's a sense of moment that's visited itself upon a particular place and time. Apparently with a sense of urgency or adamance. And it says the time for choosing is at hand. You may refuse to choose, and in so doing, choose. The hour is upon you. And you don't get a vote about that. You do, however, get a vote on how you shall be now that that is so. Which is basically the meaning of the word fate. Fate means, you know, the gods have spoken, that's what the world is. What shall you do now that they have done so? I don't know if a piece of land is understandable. I think the ultimate defeat of your intent to understand it is the understanding. That's why it's important. Because it's bigger than you, no matter how small it is. And ultimately, your capacity to be grateful for being alive is rooted in the fact that everything's bigger than you. Even this barn behind me here is a temple to what I'm talking about now. You know, it's 120 years old or give or take, and it's been on this site a year. Two years ago, I caught wind of the fact that the current owners have decided on summer homes for all on that farm. No more farm. No more farm buildings. As a result, I got in touch with the guy who'd been contracted to take them all down and dispose of them. I went over and chose amongst the farm buildings the one most likely to survive disassembly and reassembly here on my farm. In the process of taking them apart, I found the names of three of the makers of the barn. This was a living thing. It derives from the days when people knew how to do it. Almost nobody knows how to do that. A lot of people knew how to do it not that long ago. They're all dead. Most of their work is, quote, dead and in the dust too. But this one isn't. And I consider myself really lucky to have been put in the position of operating as if some generations ago, people built something that they hoped would work and therefore last. And I'm in the conduit of seeing to it that they weren't wrong. You can't get this kind of agrarian equivalent of stained glass light many places. But this for me is stained glass light of a cathedral. And I'm a cathedral's janitor, not the high priest. And if you can see these things for what they are, you get a chance of the end of a long day. You could say, not so bad. And that's plenty. Not so bad is plenty. Thank you so much for watching this film. My name is Mattias and I'm the director of the film and the founder of Campfire Stories. 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