By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr
I stumbled upon Wendell Berry the way you sometimes “discover” a treasure that others have long known and valued. While reading through a poetry anthology I encountered a few poems of his. Immediately I wondered how I had missed him, and felt a bit of shame that I was meeting Mr. Berry’s work in my 30s.
The luminosity, gravitas and in some cases pure, unadulterated joy of his poems leap off the page and the physical effect is immediate – dizziness, wonderment and transport to a parallel but wholly different dimension. Years before I’d heard of the slow food movement or cared about organic farming, I was enamored with Wendell Berry.
Eating Is an Agricultural Act
Since his death on August 31, I’ve been reading the tributes with grief and gratitude.
Long before “farm to table” showed up on menus, Wendell Berry was farming in Kentucky and writing about what industrial agriculture was doing to our land, our bodies and our communities. His thinking on organic farming, local food, pesticides and living in harmony with nature helped shape the sustainability movement, the Alliance included. Michael Pollan said one sentence of Berry’s changed his life: “Eating is an agricultural act.”
He wrote more than 40 books and farmed the same Kentucky ground for six decades. Like Pollan I was forever changed.
I reflect on the lines of his poem How to Be a Poet every day:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Berry reminded me that everyday life is sacred, that the places we live, no matter how ordinary, are sacred. He showed me, a child of the suburbs, that place is important no matter how rectangular or be-lawned. Perhaps Berry was the one who gave me permission to lie under the hibiscus bush in my rented yard and become mesmerized by its leaves. That permission has changed the way I understand my life, the way I deal with trauma, the way I maintain hope in a quickly evaporating world.
Eleven Lines for the Nights When Despair for the World Keeps You Awake
Berry’s poem The Peace of Wild Things holds grief, anxiety, fear, grace, nature and belonging to a place. It acknowledges loss and the immeasurable solastalgia of life on a rapidly changing planet, offering the simplest genuine and restorative comfort.
The imagery is spare. Wood drake. Water. Great heron. Day-blind stars. Yet those limited words are powerfully soothing, conjuring the most basic salves for a world that won’t stop shouting.
Wendell Berry composed this poem “under a thick cultural cloudscape of despair — at the peak of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, after the successive assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Dr. King, in the wake of Silent Spring and its disquieting wakeup call for our broken relationship with nature,” according to Maria Popova.
Popova also asserts, “Berry learned one of the hardest, most beautiful truths about living a rich life — a kind of existential contemplative practice of inclining the mind, whatever the conditions of the body, toward delight.” The unsentimental delight he derived from lying down next to still water has comforted millions of people for almost 60 years.
The Peace of Wild Things By Wendell Berry (listen to him read his poem)
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
If videos speak to you, watch this graceful short animated film of Berry reading The Peace of Wild Things, with images by illustrator Charlotte Age.