Optogeorgia.
Do you know anyone named George? The common Greek word for ‘farmer’
is a combination of ‘Ge’ (earth, land, as in Geology) and ‘Eorge’
(work, as in the root word for Energy and Ergonomics). So ‘George’
means ‘works the land’. While the state of Georgia is named after
King George, that same form is also the Greek word roughly for
‘farming’. I wanted a word for the point of view from a homestead,
from one who works land. Do you recall W.C. Bryant’s poem "Thanatopsis" (A View of Death)?
The things you notice, the mental processes you employ, and the
evaluation and conclusion of everything is changed forever once
someone has seen it as a homesteader. I’m not talking about
pontificators and wannabes, but someone who has stood there by the
garden, or grain field, or flock or herd and known that how they were
to fare for the coming season depended on the Earth (the ‘Ge’ part of
the word) directly. Take a ride through the country from the nearest
town to your homestead with a non-homesteader and when you arrive ask
them what they saw along the way. Then make that same trip with a
subsistence farmstead and ask what they saw. "Those dead trees at the
bend in the county right of way, I noticed how much fire wood there
was in them. And that overly wide shoulder at the bottom of the hill, if there were a way to fence it that would be, what, three or
more weeks pasture for a cow. That vacant spot between those two
buildings, I couldn’t help but mentally calculate how many cabbages
you could fit in three. And all those leaves and trimmings piled up
on the median …. that would fill up three compost bins."
Half-baked and fearful views about what is going on in the world now
are a dime a dozen. Yet here on this list are a good number of
people I happen to know for a fact have their boots in the muck,
their hands in well worn work gloves, and their weathered eye on the
field. It is those people’s views I want to read because they are
unique, seen from this Optogeorgia, a land-working view, viewpoints
not easily had from elsewhere.
It’s just getting to be a little more effort to sift out the pearls
from the rotting oysters amid all the verbose blather here. But that
comes and goes on this list as it does on most. First, I suppose I
am reminding myself, is to consider the source. Is the view coming
from the worker of the land, or is it from some other focus … or none
at all?
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