How long does it take to make the woods?

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.





~ Wendell Berry
 from A Timbered Choir

a great coauthorship

 

Each of us has had many authors, 

and each of us is engaged, 

for better or worse, in that same authorship. 

We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship 

in which we are collaborating with God and nature

 in the making of ourselves and one another. 

From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly,

 or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate

 is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product.

The business of humanity is undoubtedly survival in this complex sense —

 a necessary, difficult, and entirely fascinating job of work. We have in us

 deeply planted instructions — personal, cultural, and natural — to survive, 

and we do not need much experience to inform us that we cannot survive alone. 

The smallest possible “survival unit,” indeed, appears to be the universe… 

Inside it, everything happens in concert; not a breath is drawn but by the grace

 of an inconceivable series of vital connections joining an inconceivable multiplicity

 of created things in an inconceivable unity. 

it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods,

 and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites 

by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe… 

They give the word “love” its only chance to mean, 

for only they can give it a history,

 a community, and a place. 

 in such ways can love become flesh

 and do its worldly work.

It is  in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth;

 it is to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us

 that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… 

Separate from the relationships,

 there is nobody to be known.

~ Wendell Berry

taken from  The Art of the Commonplace

art: Share in the wonder of the Shared Sky exhibition | by Stuart Buchanan

with thanks to The Marginalian by Maria Popova

in the wild places

 

True solitude is found in the wild places, 

where one is without human obligation. 

One’s inner voices become audible. 

One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. 

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. 

The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, 

the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

 One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.

~ Wendell Berry

from "Healing" 

found in What Are People For?

our separatedness and our grief

 

 

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

art by Luke Marston

Coast Salish Artist

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

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

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).

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


 

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

 

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

 

 

  

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

.

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

Crystal Wilkinson and Wendell Berry

 

 

 

 

 ~ Crystal Wilkinson, Wendell Berry

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

   

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