“Our daily bond”, by Mathieu Yon, a spirituality of the earth

Our Daily Connection: The Need for an Earth Spirituality

by Mathieu Yon

New city, 144 p., €14.90

The story of Mathieu Yon could have resembled many fashionable stories: a young city-dweller, fed up with his monotonous daily life, sets sail to taste life in the countryside. But Mathieu Yon has never been a finance executive. At the age of 20, after an adolescence marked by an imperious need to “flee social conventions”, he was a wandering monk in India and then a hermit in a cave. An “intense spiritual search” which finally led him to Paris, where he studied philosophy.

It was after several years as a social worker that he decided in his thirties, with his partner Julie and her children, to “return to the land”. A return, not a discovery, because he grew up in the Drôme, and already has an intimate knowledge of rural life: “If I became a farmer, it was probably out of loyalty to my childhood. »

“Restore pride and dignity” to farmers

Mathieu Yon describes with passion and meticulousness how he conceives his new profession of market gardener, from the technique of no-tillage, in the service of organic farming respectful of his ecosystem, to the concern to sell his production to a clientele not necessarily well off. . He recounts the rediscovered pleasure of physical work, vegetables that are not picked in the same way, spinach wet from the rain. But he also suffers from the situation of farmers in France, wondering how to “give them pride and dignity”.

The life story gradually gives way to a reflection on human existence seen from a field, on your knees, hands in the ground. The author’s experience, and his fine reading of the work of Simone Weil, which he claims to be, lead him to draw the outlines of a spirituality of land and work.

This spirituality would leave room in our lives for long times and silences. He sees it as a “concrete and incarnate response to the danger of excessive consumption”. He encourages people to give up their mobile phone and an increasingly uprooted life when they can, and to find “a capacity for attention and a presence in the world”. A spirituality at the service of a nobly political project: “Building an equitable and just society. »

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