Every Seventh Year..

on substack * on leaving a podcast * on 7th year traditions * on two new books * on new music

Here is the substack of David Benjamin Blower.

If you are here, it's because you're subscribed to my email list. MailChimp began wanting money and I didn't have it, so this is a migration.

I'm writing to you in beautiful iron-wrought Moor Street Station, Birmingham. An old steam engine just chuffed through. Glories of the mechanical age. It's father's day so I'm thinking of my father and I'm thinking of my children and myself between, tender and dubious.

I've recorded my last interview for Nomad podcast. It's been seven years. I asked my friend, who is a biologist: is it true that our bodies replace themselves entirely over the course of seven years? He says not. Even so. I feel myself called to other ways. Seven years feels enough time.

In the law of Moses, every seventh year the land would go unfarmed. It would be a year of stores and foraging. "Eat what the land yields during its Sabbath." This is good agricultural practice because soil needs to rest to stay fertile. Most manage this by crop-rotation so there's no break in the food system. The rash idea of year's farming ceasefire does something else. It cultivates a sort of messianic memory of some ancestral time before the agricultural humans, when food was a free gift of the biosphere and was not taken by force at the end of a plough. One year in seven to dilute the total rule of the food system. One year in seven to wander through it all as creatures in a wild garden. One year in seven to re-member.

This kind of tradition keeps the back door open on our systems. It dilutes hegemony. It prevents total enclosure. When apocalypses gape and things collapse, we are at least aware of a world outside the one that is unraveling.

Honest question: what shall we not do every seven years?

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I have finished drafts of two books. I'm editing my way through them in the gaps between things.

One is on messianism, anarchy and ecology. I'll share sketches here in coming days. It sits in the space of exchange between realms of theology and sacredness and realms of life and culture and work, where we are building ways of being together.

The other is a book-length poem, a language trance, to dilute the present way of things, to soften the unraveling a little bit. I'll share sketches here too.

I am also feverishly recording but I have nothing to say about that yet.

Your thoughts, questions, misgivings and provocations are all precious to me.

Grace and Peace

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