we travelers

We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessings brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.



~ Wendell Berry

you can go

There is a place you can go

where you are quiet,

a place of water and the light

on the water. Trees are there,

leaves, and the light

on leaves moved by air.

Birds, singing, move

among leaves, in leaf shadow.

After many years you have come

to no thought of these,

but they are themselves

your thoughts. There seems to be

little to say, less and less.

Here they are. Here you are.

Here as though gone.

None of us stays, but in the hush

where each leaf in the speech

of leaves is sufficient syllable

the passing light finds out

surpassing freedom of its way.

~ Wendell Berry

from Sabbaths 1998, VII

the long lesson

Again I resume the long

lesson:  how small a thing

can be pleasing, how little

in this hard world it takes

to satisfy the mind

and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc

the woods this morning is

almost unnaturally still.

Through stalled air, unshadowed

light, a few leaves fall

of their own weight.

The sky

is gray.  It begins in mist

almost at the ground

and rises forever.  The trees

rise in silence almost

natural, but not quite,

almost eternal, but

not quite.

What more did I

think I wanted?  Here is

what has always been.

Here is what will always

be.  Even in me,

the  Maker of all this

returns in rest, even

to the slightest of His works,

a yellow leaf slowly

falling, and is pleased.

~ Wendell Berry

when we no longer know what to do

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

~  Wendell Berry

how to be

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down.  Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection,  reading,  knowledge,

skill -- more of each

than you have  -- inspiration,

work,  growing older,  patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity.  Any readers

who like your work,

doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly.  Live

a three - differential life;

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of silence,  like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

~ Wendell Berry

photo - Sitting Bull

by F.A. Rinehart

a journey of one inch

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

(Collected Poems)

photo by: Kathleen Connally

the storm

.

We lay in our bed as in a tomb
awakened by thunder to the dark
in which our house was one with night,
and then light came as if the black
roof of the world had cracked open,
as if the night of all time had broken,
and out our window we glimpsed the world
birthwet and shining, as even
the sun at noon had never made it shine.

~ Wendell Berry

.

singly

They come singly, the little streams,

Out of their solitude.  They bear

In their rough fall a spate of gleams

That glance and dance in morning air.

They come singly, and coming go

Ever downward toward the river

Into whose dark abiding flow

They come, now quieted, together.

In dark they mingle and are made

At one with light in highest flood

Embodied and inhabited,

The budded branch as red as blood.

~ Wendell Berry

from This Day - Collected & New Sabbath Poems

the secret fish

As timely as a river

God's timeless life passes

Into this world. It passes

Through bodies, giving life,

And past them, giving death.

The secret fish leaps up

Into the light and is 

Again darkened. The sun

Comes from the dark, it lights

The always passing river,

Shines on the great-branches tree,

And goes. Longing and dark,

We are completely filled

With breath of love, in us

Forever incomplete.

~ Wendell Berry

from Sabbaths 2000

shrink us to our proper size

III

Yes, though hope is our duty,

let us live a while without it

to show ourselves we can.

Let us see that, without hope,

we still are well.  Let hopelessness

shrink us to our proper size.

Without it we are half as large

as yesterday, and the world

is twice as large.  My small

place grows immense as I walk

upon it without hope.

Our springtime rue anemones

as I walk among them, hoping 

not even to live, are beautiful

as Eden, and I their kinsman

am immortal in their moment.

~ Wendell Berry

to drift

He wanted to drift on the river not so much to see where it went 

as to be one with it, to go with it as virtually a part of it.  

He wished perhaps to live out a kind of parable.  

One cannot drift by intention - 

or at least, in intending to drift and in drifting, 

one must accept a severe limitation upon one's intentions.  

But in giving oneself to the currents, 

in thus subordination one's intentions, 

one becomes eligible for unintended goods, 

unwished -for gifts - 

and often these goods and gifts surpass 

those that one has intended or wished for.

 And so a drifter subscribes necessarily to a kind of faith 

that is identical both to the absolute trust of migrating birds 

and to the scripture that bids us to lose our lives in order to find them.  

Harlan stated it in 1932 with characteristic simplicity: 

"I believe that whatever we need is at hand."

~ Wendell Berry

from "Harlan Hubbard - Life and Work"

photo by Ansel Adams

a gracious lady came to us

A gracious lady came to us

and favored us by receiving

kindly our care of her

at the end of all her days.

She was a lady made graceful

beyond what we had known

by the welcome she gave to death,

her guest, whom she made unfearful

by her fearlessness, having no further

use for herself as we had known her.

~ Wendell Berry

sowing

In the stilled place that once was a road going down

from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture,  Between

history's death upon the place and the trees that would have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

woodcut by Harlan Hubbard

song in the year of catastrophe

I began to be followed by a voice saying:

"It can't last.  It can't last.

Harden yourself.  Harden yourself.

Be ready.  Be ready."

"Go look under the leaves,"

it said, "for what is living there

is dead in your tongue."

And it said, "Put your hands

into the earth.  Live close

to the ground. Learn the darkness.

Gather round you all

the things that you love, name

their names, prepare

to lose them,  It will be

as if all you know were turned

around within your body."

And I went and put my hands 

into the ground, and they took root

and grew into a season's harvest.

I looked behind the veil

of the leaves, and heard voices

that I knew had been dead

in my tongue years before my birth.

I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me. 

Waking in the early mornings,

I could hear it, like a bird

bemused among the leaves,

a mockingbird idly singing

in the autumn of catastrophe:

"Be ready.   Be ready.

Harden yourself.  Harden yourself."

And I heard the sound 

of a great engine pounding

in the air, and a voice asking:

"Change or slavery?

Hardship or slavery?"

and the voices answering:

"Slavery!  Slavery!"

And I was afraid, loving 

what I know would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:

"you have not yet come close enough.

Come nearer the ground.  Learn

from the woodcock in the woods

whose feathering is a ritual

of the fallen leaves,

and from the nesting quail

whose speckling makes her hard to see

in the long grass.

Study the coat of the mole.

For the farmer shall wear

the greenery and the furrows

of his fields, and bear

the long standing of the woods."

And I asked: "you mean a death, then?"

"yes," the voice said.  "Die

into what the earth requires of you."

Then let go all holds, and sank

like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,

and at last came fully into the ease

and the joy of that place,

all my lost ones returning.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

art by Roderick Maclver

the peace of wild things

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.





~ Wendell Berry

the wild

In the empty lot - a place

not natural, but wild - among

the trash of human absence,

the slough and shamble

of the city's seasons, a few

old locusts bloom.

A few woods birds

fly and sing

in the new foliage

 - warblers and tanagers, birds

wild as leaves; in a million

each one would be rare,

new to the eyes.  A man

couldn't make a habit

of such color,

such flight and singing.

But they are the habit of this 

wasted place.  In them

the ground is wise.  They are

its remembrance of what it is.

~ Wendell Berry

from The Selected Poems

radical discontinuity

I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways:
 as a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature,
 spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, 
worship and work, and so on. This dualism, I think, is the most destructive disease
 that afflicts us. In it’s best-known, it’s most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version,
 it is the dualism of body and soul. This is an issue as difficult as it is important,
 and so to deal with it we should start at the beginning…

~ Wendell Berry

from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

earth and fire

In this woman the earth speaks

Her words open in me, cells of light

flashing in my body, and make a song

that I follow toward her out of my need.

The pain I have given her I wear

like another skin, tender, the air

around me flashing with thorns.

And yet such joy as I have given her

sings in me and is part of her song.

The winds of her knees shake me

like a flame.  I have risen up from her,

time and again, a new man.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming

welcomers of that ancient joy

In a crease of the hill

under the light,

out of the wind,

as warmth, bloom, and song

return, lady, I think of you,

and myself with you.

What are we but forms

of self-acknowledging

light that brings us

warmth and song from time

to time? Lip and flower,

hand and leaf, tongue

and song, what are we but welcomers

of that ancient joy, always

coming, always passing?

Mayapples rising

out of old time, leaves

folded down around

the stems, as if for flight,

flower bud folded in 

unfolding leaves, what

are we but hosts

of times, of all

the Sabbath morning shows,

the light that finds it good.

~ Wendell Berry

from This Day - Collected and New Sabbath Poems

when we convene again

When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out of the window

at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.



~ Wendell Berry