Zoro's Fields: My Life in the Appalachian Woods by Thomas Rain Crowe (The University of Georgia Press, $27.95)
"I never meant to come here. It all happened rather serendipitously--a lark that led to something stronger, more compelling, profound. I did what Joseph Campbell has called following your bliss--which led me here to the outskirts of a mountaintop farm and a small clearing surrounded by poplars and pines. I have been here, now, for a little over three years, scratching out an existence from the field that once fed the Zoro Guice family with rhubarb, mustard greens, Irish potatoes, and pole beans, and that now feeds me.
During these years of hibernating from humanity, I have come to believe that we must go home again. Whether home is literally where we are native or where our place-based imagination resides. To re-turn as 'new natives' to do the work. 'The real work,' as my California friend and mentor Gary Snyder says. The work that puts blisters and then smooth calluses on the hands and mind as we strive to work reciprocally and in balance and harmony with the native people and the land. The kind of work that is collected and referenced in the libraries of the lives of elder men and women who have spent long lifetimes in one place learning and applying that knowledge to an agrarian and nature-based style of life. Knowledge taught and learned, protected and passed down from generation to generation as part of a culture soon to disappear…" --excerpted from the book
