Tag: Wendell Berry

Those Quiet Eyes…

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Who loves the rain    
    And loves his home, 
And looks on life with quiet eyes,  
     Him will I follow through the storm;    
     And at his hearth-fire keep me warm;
Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise,    
     Who loves the rain, 
     And loves his home, 
And looks on life with quiet eyes.
~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow of Grace

Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~Wendell Berry from “There is no going back”

What a wonder I was
when I was young, as I learn
by the stern privilege
of being old: how regardlessly
I stepped the rough pathways
of the hillside woods,
treaded hardly thinking
the tumbled stairways
of the steep streams, and worked
unaching hard days
thoughtful only of the work,
the passing light, the heat, the cool
water I gladly drank.
~Wendell Berry “VII” 2015 from Another Day

Love is a universe beyond
The daylight spending zone:
As one we more abound
Than two alone.
~Wendell Berry “VIII” 2015 from Another Day


Thinking out loud on this day you were born,
I thank God each day
for bringing you to earth
so we could meet,
raise three amazing children,
now six wonderful grandchildren,
and walk this journey together
with pulse and breath and dreams.

The boy you were
became the man you are:
so blessed by God,
so needed by your family, church and community.

You give yourself away every day with such grace.

It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first
and just knew
I’d follow you anywhere
and I have.

In this journey together,
we inhabit each other,
however long may be the road we travel;
you have become the air I breathe,
refreshing, renewing, restoring~~
you are that necessary to me,
and that beloved.

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Feeling Them Resting There

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The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still.
I went over to the graveyard beside the church
and found them under the old cedars…
I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there,
but I did…

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated
with presences and absences,
presences of absences,
the living and the dead.
The world as it is
would always be a reminder
of the world that was,
and of the world that is to come.
~Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow

In great deeds, something abides. 
On great fields, something stays. 
Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; 
but spirits linger, 
to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. 

And reverent men and women from afar, 
and generations that know us not and that we know not of, 
heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, 
to ponder and dream; and lo!
the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, 
and the power of the vision pass into their souls. 

This is the great reward of service. 
To live, far out and on, in the life of others;
this is the mystery of the Christ,
–to give life’s best for such high sake
that it shall be found again unto life eternal.
~Major-General Joshua Chamberlain, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 1889

A box of over 700 letters, exchanged between my parents from late 1941 to mid-1945, sat unopened for six decades.

I started reading. I felt them resting in those inked words.

My parents barely knew each other before marrying quickly on Christmas Eve 1942 – the haste due to the uncertain future for a newly trained Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. They only had a few weeks together before she returned home to her rural teaching position and he readied himself to be shipped out for the island battles to come.

They had no idea they would not see each other for another 30+ months or even see each other again at all. They had no idea their marriage would fall apart 35 years later and they would reunite a decade after the divorce for five more years together before Dad died of cancer at age 73.

A presence of absence: the letters do contain the long-gone but still-familiar voices of my parents, but they are the words and worries of youngsters of 20 and 21, barely prepared for the horrors to come from war and interminable waiting. When he was fighting battles on Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, no letters or news would be received for a month or more, otherwise they tried to write each other daily, though with minimal news to share due to military censorship. They speak mostly of their desire for a normal life together rather than a routine centered on mailbox, pen and paper and waiting – lots and lots of waiting.

I’m not sure what I hoped to find in these letters. Perhaps I hoped for flowery romantic whisperings and the poetry of longing and loneliness. Instead I am reading plain spoken words from two people who somehow made it through those awful years to make my sister and brother and myself possible.

Our inheritance is contained in this musty box of words bereft of poetry. But decades later my heart is moved by these letters – I carefully refold them back into their envelopes and replace them gently back in order. A six cent airmail stamp – in fact hundreds and hundreds of them – was a worthwhile investment in the future, not only for themselves and their family to come, but for generations of U.S. citizens who tend to take their freedom for granted.

Thank you, Dad and Mom, for the early years together you gave up to make today possible for us and the generations to follow.

I hear the mountain birds
The sound of rivers singing
A song I’ve often heard
It flows through me now
So clear and so loud
I stand where I am
And forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home

It’s carried in the air
The breeze of early morning
I see the land so fair
My heart opens wide
There’s sadness inside
I stand where I am
And forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home

This is no foreign sky
I see no foreign light
But far away am I
From some peaceful land
I’m longing to stand
A hand in my hand
…forever I’m dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I’m dreaming of home
~Lori Barth and Philippe Rombi “I’m Dreaming of Home”

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The Soul Can Split the Sky in Two

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All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.

Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay at age 19, from “Renascence”

I know for a while again,
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which I may even step
forth from myself and be free.
~ Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2000

I was told once by someone I respected that my writing reflected “sacramental” living —  reflecting my effort to touch and taste the holiness of everyday moments, as if they are the cup and bread that sustain us.

I allowed that feedback to sit warmly beside me, like a comforting companion during the hours I struggled with what to share here.

Yet, as tomorrow begins weeks of Lenten observance, I realize it is all too tempting to emphasize sacrament over the sacrifice it inevitably represents. 

As much as I love the world and the beauty I find here, I need to recognize there will be “thin places” between heaven and earth where we must forget “self” and step forth through a holy threshold into something far greater.

So I struggle with what sacrificial living truly means, as a terrifying illuminating freedom remaining far beyond my grasp.

I may even step
forth from myself and be free…

photo of San Juan Islands by Joel De Waard
photo of San Juan Islands by Joel De Waard
photo of San Juan Islands by Joel De Waard
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Soon Enough

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When I was young, I cut the bigger, older trees for firewood, the ones with heart rot, dead and broken branches, the crippled and deformed ones,

because, I reasoned, they were going to fall soon anyway, and therefore, I should give the younger trees more light and room to grow.

Now I’m older and I cut the younger, strong and sturdy, solid
and beautiful trees, and I let the older ones have a few more years

of light and water and leaf in the forest they have known so long.
Soon enough they will be prostrate on the ground.
~David Budbill “The Woodcutter Changes His Mind” from While We’ve Still Got Feet

…we are fallen like the trees, our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know,
And must await the wayward-coming grace
That joins living and dead,
Taking us where we would not go–
Into the boundless dark.
When what was made has been unmade
The Maker comes to His work.
~Wendell Berry from  “Sabbaths, II”

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last:
into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
~Jane Kenyon, from “Things” in Collected Poems

I know I am brief and finite,
leaning more and more from the prevailing winds,
wobbly through each storm that comes.

Things I wish would last
don’t, so I hold them lightly in love.

I must trust God’s Light passes
through the darkness,
an illuminated pathway
I follow,
even when falling,
even when finite and failing
until I am part of the Light myself.

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Tell About It

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Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
― Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields…
Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
~Mary Oliver from “Why I Wake Early”

(to remind myself)

i  

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.

ii  

Breathe with unconditional breath  
the unconditioned air.  
Stay away from anything  
that obscures the place it is in.  
There are no unsacred places;  
there are only sacred places  
and desecrated places.  

iii  

Accept what comes from silence.  
Make the best you can of it.  
Of the little words that come  
out of the 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 from “How to Be a Poet”

Here I am, telling you what I pluck out of silence every morning,
tossing my prayer to the world to share
what is astonishing to me
so as not to forget each moment.

Here you are, listening to this silence every morning,
reacting with kindness, receiving my heart –
this is even more astonishing to me
and sacred.

Thank you for being here to see what I find.
Thank you for sharing with others in your life.
Thank you for letting me know it makes a difference.
Thank you for making the best of my little words and pictures.

Welcome back, each and every day.
Happy you are here.

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Just a Couple of Aging Fools

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All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust
out of the trailer truck into the chute.
From time to time he’s clambered down to even
the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust.
Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.

I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff
he says, while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked
with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks.
I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn

no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses
burst through when snow avalanches off the roof.
Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his,
horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces.

…he says
let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset
and off we go, a couple of aging fools.

I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot
less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.
~Maxine Kumin from “Chores”

photo by Emily Vander Haak

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
~Wendell Berry “They Sit Together on the Porch”

If just for a moment,
when this world is tilting so far
we just might fall off,
we pause to look at where we’ve been
and get our feet back under us.

The porch is a good place to start:
a bridge to what is beyond
without leaving the familiar.

Outside, looking square at the unknown,
yet still hearing and smelling and tasting
the love that dwells just inside these walls.

What could we want more
than to be missed when we step away?

Our voice, our words, our heart, our touch
never to be replaced,
its absence a hole impossible to fill?

When we are called back inside
where Love made us who we are,
may the “in between” of
time spent on the porch,
be even more treasured,
because two aging fools sat together there a spell.

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God’s Dust

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…war spreading,
families dying,
the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside,
sowing clover…
~Wendell Berry “February 2, 1968”

However you may come, 
You’ll see it suddenly
Lie open to the light
Amid the woods: a farm
Little enough to see
Or call across—cornfield,
Hayfield, and pasture, clear
As if remembered, dreamed
And yearned for long ago,
Neat as a blossom now
With all the pastures mowed
And the dew fresh upon it,
Bird music all around.
That is the vision, seen
As on a Sabbath walk:
The possibility
Of human life whose terms
Are Heaven’s and this earth’s.

The land must have its Sabbath
Or take it when we starve.
The ground is mellow now,
Friable and porous: rich.
Mid-August is the time
To sow this field in clover
And grass, to cut for hay
Two years, pasture a while,
And then return to corn.

This way you come to know
That something moves in time
That time does not contain.
For by this timely work
You keep yourself alive
As you came into time,
And as you’ll leave: God’s dust,
God’s breath, a little Light.
~Wendell Berry from The Farm

These are fragrant acres where
Evening comes long hours late
And the still unmoving air
Cools the fevered hands of Fate.

Meadows where the afternoon
Hangs suspended in a flower
And the moments of our doom
Drift upon a weightless hour.

And we who thought that surely night
Would bring us triumph or defeat
Only find that stars are white
Clover at our naked feet.
~Tennessee Williams “Clover”

Farming is daily work outside of the constraints of time –
labor done this day is caring for what is eternal,
despite weather, war, uncertainty.

There is a timelessness about summer:
the preparing and planting and preserving,
a cycle of living and dying repeating through generations.

We, like our farming forebears, will become God’s dust again.

I’m reminded, walking through our pasture’s clover,
I become seed and soil for the next generation.
Like a blossom so plain and unnoticed during its life,
I enfolds myself back to the ground, sighing and dying.

Perhaps it is the breath of clover
we should remember at the last,
as God’s own breath.

Inhale deeply of Him in the dust of the clover field.

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Rending the Heavens

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Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!
As when fire sets twigs ablaze
and causes water to boil…
~Isaiah 64:1-2

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which 
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
-Wendell Berry “To My Mother” from Entries

It was a summer morning six years ago, beginning much like this one: something woke me early at 4:45 AM.  

Perhaps it was the orange glow bathing my face through the curtains. Never one to miss a light show, I heeded the call and got up and dressed.

Once outside, I was amazed to see storm clouds boiling –  shifting and swirling in unrest as if something or someone may emerge momentarily.

No trumpets though.
The music in the air was the usual early morning bird song,
and sherbet-orange leaves normalized to green.

Within a minute, the heavens settled. Unentangled from my dismay, so did I.

Yet for a moment that morning, I did wonder what might become of us all. That thought still occurs to me each morning, as I realize how much merciful grace embodies the heavens above.

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Warmness of Clover Breath

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To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
~Wendell Berry “Enriching the Earth” from Collected Poems

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer,
it was the warmness of clover breath.
Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes.
And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness
was held forever…
~Ray Bradbury from Dandelion Wine

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson

Every autumn my father, an agriculture teacher by training, brought home gunny sacks of grass seed from the feed and seed store.  He would start up his 1954 Farmall Cub tractor, proceed to disc and harrow an acre of bare ground in our field, and then fill the seeder, distributing seed on the soil for his annual agronomy cover crop over winter growing experiment.  The little sprouts would wait to appear in the warming spring weather, an initial green haziness spread over the brown dirt, almost like damp green mold.  Within days they would form a plush and inviting velveteen green cushion, substantial enough for a little wiggle of blades in the breezes.  A few weeks later the cover would be a full fledged head of waving green hair, the wind blowing it wantonly, bending the stems to its will.  It was botanical pasture magic, renewable and marvelous,  only to be mowed and stubble turned over with the plow back into the soil as nutrition for the summer planting to come.  It was the sacrificial nature of cover crops to be briefly beautiful on top of the ground, but the foundational nurture once underground.

One spring the expected grassy carpet growth didn’t look quite the same after germination–the sprouts were little round leaves, not sharp edged blades.  Instead of identical uniform upright stems, the field was producing curly chaotic ovoid and spherical shapes and sizes. Clover didn’t abide by the same rules as grasses.  It had a mind of its own with a burgeoning and bumpy napped surface that didn’t bend with breezes, all its effort invested instead in producing blossoms.

A hint of pink one morning was so subtle it was almost hallucinatory.  Within a day it was unmistakeably reddening and real.  Within a week the green sea flowed with bobbing crimson heads. We had never seen such vibrancy spring from our soil before.  It exuded scented clover breath, the fragrance calling honey bees far and near.  True reverie.

The field of crimson dreams and sated honey bees lasted several weeks before my father headed back out on the Farmall to turn it under with the plow, burying the fading blossoms into the ground.  Their sacrifice bled red into the soil, their fragrant breath halted, their memory barely recognizable in the next summer crop germination.   Yet the crimson heads were there, feeding the growth of the next generation, deepening the green as it reached to the sun.

Such a sweet thing, alive a thousand summers hence in the soil.

What a beautiful feeling.

Crimson and clover, over and over.

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Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – An Ache Nothing Can Satisfy

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At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
~Richard Wilbur “Hamlen Brook”

Weeping may tarry for the night,
    but joy comes with the morning.
Psalm 30:5

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 Peace of Wild Things”

I too thirst for stillness – for peace and lack of worry. If only for a few minutes, I want to stand outside my own thoughts and concerns to absorb the beauty of this world. At times, the loveliness around me makes me ache, knowing there is much more than this, just out of reach.

Dumbstruck at the thought.

I know what I see here is temporary; it pales in comparison to what remains unseen and eternal. The best is yet to come. The best is forever.

Joy comes in the morning.

dragonfly wings photo by Josh Scholten

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is taken from 2 Corinthians 4: 18:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.