© BY B SHAWN CLARK - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (AS TO ALL CONTENT AND REFERENCED WORKS)

How could he lecture someone else about what to do when he was himself still trying to figure that out for himself?  

He was still searching for meaning to his existence in faraway places, or in his own fields of grass and trees that tended to him more so than he did to them.  

He tried valiantly to share this with his daughter, trying to teach her how she needed a vision quest of her own but, alas, she hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

He sought out a very old wise man who taught Sunday school classes in Plains, Georgia.  

The wise man was himself a farmer and a man of letters who tried to lead a nation in her hour of need, when she needed deliverance from a corrupt and twisted man who was anything but an enlightened man of letters, or of the right words - words that gave the kind of spiritual nourishment the people needed, even if they didn’t know it.  

* * * The sermons of the Farmer Poet were heart-felt yet simple for such a complex man, the most profound of truths often being those grounded in just a few, simple observations made in answer to seemingly simple questions such as “why do things grow?” or “why am I stuck here in a place I don’t want to be?”

The answers may be easier than you think.

The people, it turned out, didn’t want to hear a sermon.  They just wanted simple answers to even the most complex of problems that were facing the world.

They didn’t know these were problems of the human soul.

Here was a wise man giving his sermon as his wife, who just celebrated her 91st birthday sat patiently at his side, figuratively and literally, for all those years – then and now.  They were devoted to one another and to the small town of country folk who listened and sometimes heard the words that they needed to hear – words that they needed to sustain their souls as much as the sustenance for their mortal flesh from the bounty they reaped in the fields they worked. * * *

But that is not much of an answer for a daughter sitting in a jail cell whose ready retort was “I am asking you to tell me what to do and all you can do is sit there, speaking in riddles.”

“Why do you keep answering my questions with questions?”

“Good question” he replied.