4. An example of the first kind of active caring-for earth might be drawn from gardening. (Heidegger observes that though the discussion in 'Building Dwelling Thinking' is confined to the topic of 'construction', 'bauen' (to build) really means not only 'to construct' but also 'to cultivate'. (One speaks in German of a 'Weinbau'. vineyard, a farmer is a 'Bauer'.) The following might, therefore, he thought of as a contribution towards a 'second part' of that essay.)

Passive caring-for the earth is. of course, a central part of authentic gardening. As a dweller in a holy world, the authentic gardener will reverence the fundamental order of things already present in the site that is to be the garden rather than seeking to bulldoze a novel order. She will seek to 'tread lightly' on the site. Sometimes, however, her care for the site will be active rather than passive. Under what conditions? The Sukutei-ki, the classic, eleventh-century manual of Japanese gardening tells us that when constructing a garden we are to 'listen to the request made by the land'. This is advice that will be followed by the authentic gardener. The 'request' may, for example, be for a lake. A correctly designed, planted and positioned lake may 'bring forth' the local birdlife, and in virtue of the serenity of its calm surface allow the contrasting 'stirring and striving' of the surrounding landscape to show forth in a more complete way. It also, of course, lets the contours of the landscape show forth by allowing them to repeat themselves in the mirror of its surface.

Both these aspects of gardening are, it seems to me. recorded in the first verse of Heidegger's 'Cézanne', a poem inspired by Cézanne's portrait of his gardener:

The thoughtfully serene [Gelassene], the urgent [inständig]
stillness of the form of the old gardener
Vallier, who tends the inconspicuous on the
Chemin des Lauves.

The old gardener's 'tending’ is his passive caring-for the earth. And his 'urgent stillness' is, I suggest, an action-ready listening - a listening for and to 'the request made by the land’. (Notice the gardener's serenity, his Gelassenheit. As a dweller in a holy world he exhibits no anxiety in the face of his advanced mortality.)

5. Another example of active caring-for earth is 'organic' farming. Unlike farming which, as a branch of the 'mechanized food industry', uses glass houses, artificial fertilizers and EU subsidies to compel the earth to yield whatever consumers demand, farming that actively cares-for the earth will be that which cultivates crops that bring forth the potentialities of the local soil, the terroir (both 'soil' and 'region'), as the French call it. Good vintners do this. One tastes the flint in the chardonnay.

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¶ 11:18 AM