A Beginning

Here is a beginning.

Been walking the beans
Been walking the beans
Been bending low, down low,
Been ripping my jeans

Been walking the beans
In the burning sun
And it looks like I ain't ever ever gonna get done.

-- Greg Brown, "Walking the Beans" from the album Iowa Waltz

This is a blog about life, love, and work, in no particular order. It seeks no particular audience.

The title of the blog is taken from a lively song of the same name by Greg Brown., about the frustrations of hoeing. The song is honest about backbreaking farm work. It romanticizes it not a bit. It treats it with humor, yes, but it is a gallows humor.

Having stolen the title, though, it is obvious that I don't have the same scruples. I am going to shamelessly romanticize hoeing. Hoeing, you see, is not just backbreaking, futile, and repetitive work, it is a metaphor! Hoeing is tending and caring for living things. Hoeing is slow and incremental work from which things of beauty and value are nurtured and born. Hoeing is after all a synonym for cultivating, and cultivating is a root for culture.

I am hoping that this blog to be a form of hoeing (probably in its more romantic formulation). By tending my row in small daily increments I hope to grow something of worth to a few people.

- J