Boethius, The Consolation 1.24

“When the sign of the crab scorches the field,

fraught with the sun's most grievous rays,

the husbandman,

who has freely entrusted his seed to the fruitless furrow,

is cheated by the faithless harvest goddess,

and he must turn to the oak tree's fruit.

When the field is scarred by the bleak north winds,

would you seek the wood's dark carpet to gather violets?

If you enjoy the grapes,

would you seek with clutching hand

to prune the vines in spring?

It is in autumn Bacchus brings his gifts.

Thus God marks out the times,

and fits to them peculiar works.

He has set out a course of change,

and lets no confusion come.

If anything turns itself to headlong ways,

and leaves its sure design,

there will be an ill outcome.”

—from Book 1, Poem 6

I have wasted so much of my time, thinking that is just about me, me, and more of me. Someone once said to me that the secret to life was simply taking every opportunity to get what I wanted. I needed to be strong, I was told, and to grab onto what I thought was rightly mine. No hesitation, no doubts. To the victor go the spoils.

Let’s call this what it really is. It’s called playing God.

Whenever I expect the world to go my way, I am doing nothing less than that. Whenever I force myself upon others, or assume that the ends justify the means, or cheat and lie to have my way, I am making myself the center.

The crucial difference is that the ideal of God, the Absolute, however we may understand Him, is Himself a measure of perfection. I, on the other hand, am hardly perfect. I am a creature, not the Creator. Whenever I demand that it go my way, I am forgetting that my own way is only a part of the way of all things joined together, ruled by one order. I am not the fullness of that order.

“I take every opportunity to get what I want.” Well, I may wish to take every opportunity, but does this extend to acting selfishly or thoughtlessly? And what is it even that I should rightly want?

Nature will follow her own course, however much I may fight or protest. Images of farming, and of living off of the land, are lost to most of us, because most of us in the developed world live in a completely artificial bubble. What we make or produce no longer reflects the way of the land, or the changes of the seasons, or the harmony of the natural world.

We pursue our vanities, and then use the spoils of those vanities to buy artificial products from others, tailored for our consumption. We become lawyers, or bankers, or fancy scholars, and then expect to be magically clothed, housed, and fed. We care little about where any of it came from, or how it was provided, as long as it’s all perfectly convenient.

A mentor of mine once put me in my place by telling me that I needed to try and grow my own fruits and vegetables, and to raise my own chickens to get some decent eggs. This could be as much about building character as it was about putting food on the table. He also suggested hunting for small game, but immediately added that this might be too much for my spoiled character. Goats, let alone cattle, he said, were way beyond my ability for the moment.

I was deeply offended, though he was completely right. Nature will give me what I may need, but only if I understand how, where, and when to find it and make good use of it.

I should not want to be served by Nature, but to find my way to rightly follow Nature. There will be an ill outcome as soon as I think otherwise. Everything has its own time and place.

What is true of the harvest, is also true of the moral life. Summer won’t be spring, and winter won’t be fall, based upon my whims. How things will happen is how they are meant to be. How I humbly relate myself to what happens is who I am meant to be.

Written in 7/2015