Showing posts with label Wendell Berry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wendell Berry. Show all posts

Sunday, March 17, 2024

gratitude







The sounds of engines leave the air.
The Sunday morning silence comes
at last.  At last I know the presence
of the world made without hands,
the creatures that have come to be 
out of their absence.  Calls
of flicker and jay fill the clear
air.  Titmice and chickadees feed
among the green and the dying leaves.
Gratitude for the gifts of all the living 
and the unliving, gratitude which is
the greatest gift, quietest of all,
passes to me through the trees.


~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings



Wednesday, March 13, 2024

the joy in which we come to rest.









Learn by little the desire for all things
which perhaps is not desire at all
but undying love which perhaps
is not love at all but gratitude
for the being of all things which
perhaps is not gratitude at all
but the maker's joy in what is made,
the joy in which we come to rest.



~ Wendell Berry



now






 
 
Young
We had not enough respect for the changing moon.
Then the days seemed to pass only to return again.
 
 
 
Now
Having learned by loss that men’s days part from them forever,
We eat and drink together beneath the full moon
Acknowledging and celebrating the power that bereft us
And yet sheds over the earth a light that is beautiful.
 
 
 
 

~ Wendell Berry
after the Painting and Poem by Shen Chou



Wednesday, March 6, 2024

its life is one

 
 
 

 


The body
is a single creature, whole,
its life is one, never less than one, or more,
so is its world, and so
are two bodies in their love for one another.
In ignorance of this
we talk ourselves to death.




~ Wendell Berry
Sabbaths, XIV


the larger circle of all creatures








We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.




~ Wendell Berry

photo Jane Goodall with a 
chimpanzee at the Tchimpounga 
Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre, 
Congo (Brazzaville).

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

their absence puts them with you

 
 
 
 

 
 
What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap,
that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here
over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever.
Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions
you think of that you ought to've asked while you had a chance are never
going to be answered. The dead know, and you don't.
 
And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before.
You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you,
and in a way you go with them. They don't live on in your heart, but your
 heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets
bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you
would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, 
because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived 
in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You
can't see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It's with your side vision, 
so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted
I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

It's our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two.





~ Wendell Berry
from Stand by Me



 

Saturday, May 13, 2023

what we need is here

 
 


 
 
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.



~ Wendell Berry



 

Thursday, May 4, 2023

a common bond










Always in big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone
 into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, 
a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown,
 and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. 
 
You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, 
but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of  our essential loneliness, 
nobody can discover the world for anybody else.
It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves
that it becomes a common ground and a common bond,
and we cease to be alone ...

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, 
no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, 
a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, 
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, 
and learn to be at home.




~ Wendell Berry
 from The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge
 


Friday, April 28, 2023

grateful to the last

 
 

 
 
 
Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved-for all we know,
it is halved-by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present.
Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting 
them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be
remembered and examined. We believe that the future is there too, for it keeps arriving,
though we know nothing about it. But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny,
or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell,
only as a leak in time, through which, if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us
and makes its claim. And here I am, an old man, traveling as a child among the dead.
 
We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life.
As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. 
I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. 
Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always
 coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, 
which is always present. Time, then, is told by love's losses, and by the coming
of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded
and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn
welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think,
is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful 
enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude
 is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.
 
 
 
 
~ Wendell Berry
from Andy Catlett
 
 
  

Monday, March 20, 2023

Inside its bends


.
.
 
 
Inside its bends, the river 
builds the land, outside
it frets the land away.
This is unjust only from
a limited view.  Forever
it doesn't matter, is only
the world's way, the give
and take, the take and 
give we suffer in order 
to live.  This household
of my work, ungainly on
its stilts, stands outside
the bend, and the river wears
near and near, flow
outlasting the standing firm.
Trees once here are gone,
the slope they stood upon
gone.  I needed what is lost,
although I love as well
the flow that took it.  Now
spring is coming, the redbird's
peal rings from the thicket,
the pair exchanges like
a kiss a seed from the feeder,
and this is timeless.  But a day
in time will come when this
house will give way, the walls
lean and fall.  Shattered will be
my window's rectitude.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings
photo by Ansel Adams
.

Sunday, March 12, 2023

invitation






Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. 
It asks us to notice that while we rest, 
the world continues without our help. 
It invites us to delight in the world’s beauty and abundance.


~ Wendell Berry



The time for contemplation is the spring that feeds our action, 
and our action will be as deep as the spring. 
We need time to allow the spirit to clear the obstacles 
– the clinging debris and mud – 
that keeps the spring from flowing freely from its clear, 
deep source. And we need time for the spring to 
overflow into insightful and compassionate action.


~ Thomas Merton


Saturday, March 11, 2023

Crystal Wilkinson and Wendell Berry

 

 

 


 

 ~ Crystal Wilkinson, Wendell Berry

 

 

 

 

Thursday, March 2, 2023

remembering now



.
 


 

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember
 it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. 
To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening.
 It can return only by surprise.
 
 Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them
 that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.
 And so you have a life that you are living only now,
now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, 
and you must be thankful for living day by day,
 moment by moment, in this presence.

.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. 
You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present,
 and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time.
 When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. 
You are remembering it as it is.
 It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present,
 alive with you in the only time you are alive.


.
~ Wendell Berry




Tuesday, February 14, 2023

ripening









.



The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!



~ Wendell Berry

Thursday, February 9, 2023

beauty of the living world

 
 
 

 
 
 
The yellow-throated warbler, the highest remotest voice
of this place, sings in the tops of the tallest sycamores,
but one day he came twice to the railing of my porch
where I sat at work above the river. He was too close
to see with binoculars. Only the naked eye could take him in,
a bird more beautiful than every picture of himself,
more beautiful than himself killed and preserved
by the most skilled taxidermist, more beautiful
than any human mind, so small and inexact,
could hope ever to remember. My mind became
beautiful by the sight of him. He had the beauty only
of himself alive in the only moment of his life.
He had upon him like the whole
beauty of the living world that never dies.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Wendell Berry
from Given Poems
(for Jonathan Williams)  
Photo by Dan Dehm
 
 

Monday, February 6, 2023

we arrive here

 
 
 
 

 
 

 
We arrive here in this world having forgotten where we came from, 
though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a distant shine
like that of a house window at night on the far side of the valley, perhaps
what some have called "the inner light," to guide us when finally we have been
jolted awake.  And so we don't come from nothing. But once here we 
don't know where we are. At first I learned the world as a book written,
completed the day before my birth, not to be changed by another penstroke.
And then I saw that some I know were departing from it, never to return,and new
 strangers were arriving. The newcomers, if they stayed, would learn
more or less of where they were. And then, in time, they too would depart, 
taking with them the sum of all they had learned, leaving behind them
maybe a few who would remember them, and then the rememberers too 
would go and be gone. I see in this the order of things, nothing to complain
about. I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of the wheel.
I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing
 through a river of earth. A far cry from a written book, the world - to
extend my desperate metaphor - is a book ceaselessly being written,
and not in a human language. This too has not been submitted to our
judgment, and it is not for us to regret. To give thanks seems truly to be
the right response, for as we come and go we learn something of love,
the gift and the giving of it, if we accept it, to give us standing hereafter.
 
That is the heart speaking in the heart's language, and out of a mystery 
so vast that order and chance may be reconciled within it. Because,
 for all we surely know, we come into our times and places as much at 
random as leaves falling,...
 
 
 
 
 
~ Wendell Berry
from How it Went - Thirteen more stories of
the Port William membership
 
 
   

Monday, December 26, 2022

epitaph







Having lived long in time,
he lives now in timelessness
without sorrow, made perfect
by our never finished love,
by our compassion and forgiveness,
and by his happiness in receiving
these gifts we give. Here in time
we are added to one another forever.




~ Wendell Berry
from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
 
 




Tuesday, September 6, 2022

our children, coming of age








In the great circle, dancing in
and out of time, you move now
toward your partners, answering
the music suddenly audible to you
that only carried you before
and will carry you again.
 
When you meet the destined ones
now dancing toward you,
out of your awareness for the time,
we whom you know, others we remember
whom you do not remember, others 
forgotten by us all.
 
When you meet, and hold love 
in your arms, regardless of all,
the unknown will dance away from you 
toward the horizon of light.
Our names will flutter
on these hills like little fires.




~ Wendell Berry




.

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

you'd like to stay

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love on another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
what ever happens.
 
This is the time you'd like to stay
Not a leaf stirs. There is no sound.
The fireflies lift light from the ground.
You've shed the vanities of when
And how and why, for now. And then
The phone rings. You are called away.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Wendell Berry
from Given Poems
 
 
 

Monday, August 29, 2022

The past above, the future below

.


"The past above, the future below
and the present pouring down..."
wrote Dr. Williams. Is that
correct? Or is the future above
and the past below?

The stream
that is departing from itself as
it was is above and is the past.
The stream that is coming to itself
as it will be is below and is
the future. Or:

The stream yet
to come is above and is the future.
The stream that has gone by
is below and is the past.

In its riddles in the world
in the mind in the world
the stream is the stream
beyond words, beginning nowhere
ending nowhere.

It falls as rain.
It flows in all its length. It enters
finally the sea. It rises into the air.
It falls as rain. To the watcher
on the shore, it comes and it
goes.

The immeasurable, untestable,
irrecoverable moment of its passing
is the present, always already
past before we can say that it is
present, that it was the future
flowing into the past or is
the past flowing into the future

or both at once into the present
that is ever-passing and eternal,
the instantaneous, abounding life.




~ Wendell Berry