Tag: Wendell Berry

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.

Touching Base

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It seemed necessary just then to touch base with the Lord. Shutting my eyes, I leaned into the horse. I prayed in words for a little while . . . and then language went away and I prayed in a soft high-pitched lament any human listener would’ve termed a whine.
We serve a patient God. . . .
~Leif Enger from Peace Like a River

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
~Wendell Berry from Jayber Crow

Sometimes prayers are uttered wordlessly while clinging to the life preserver of a furry neck. Another living breathing creature serves as witness to our need to say what often our lips cannot. They listen, they care, they know a whimper is a cry of feeling lost and alone, all pain and sadness and abandonment.

A whimper gives voice to the fear that what is, might forever be, and might never change. Our God knows better.

God’s creatures understand our groanings. And so does our patient and loving Creator understand. When we touch base to say whatever needs to be said, whatever is spilling from our broken hearts, He hears us even when words fail us.

To Recover the Lost

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The songs of small birds fade away
into the bushes after sundown,
the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.
Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters
flare in the dusk. The aged voices
of a few crickets thread the silence.
It is a quiet I love, though my life
too often drives me through it deaf.
Busy with costs and losses, I waste
the time I have to be here—a time
blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,
if only I would keep aware. The leaves
rest in the air, perfectly still.
I would like them to rest in my mind
as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,
the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,
poised there, light on the slope
as a young apple tree. A week ago
I took her away to sell, and failed
to get my price, and brought her home
again. Now in the quiet I stand
and look at her a long time, glad
to have recovered what is lost
in the exchange of something for money.
~Wendell Berry “The Sorrel Filly”

I am reminded at the end of a week
of dark and wet and cold
with chores not done yet,
and horses waiting to be fed,
of the value of decades of moments spent
with long-lashed eyes, wind-swept manes, and velvet muzzles.

True, it appears to others to be time and money wasted.
But for a farmer like me, sometimes deaf and blind
to what is in front of me every day,
not all valuables are preserved in a lock box.

Golden treasure can have
four hooves, a tail, with a rumbling greeting
asking if I’d somehow gotten lost
since I’m a little later than usual
and they were a bit concerned I’d forgotten them.

Only then I remember where my home is
and how easy it is to wander from the path
that somehow always leads me back here.

The Porch as “In-between”

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The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It’s not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there’s a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I’ve left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.
~Dorianne Laux “On the Back Porch” from Awake

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 the world feels like it is tilting so far
I just might fall off,
there is a need to pause
to look at where I’ve been
and get my feet back under me.

The porch is a good place to start:
a bridge to what exists beyond
without completely leaving the safety of inside.

I am outside looking square at uncertainty
and still hear and smell and taste
the love that dwells just inside these walls.

What could we want more
than to be missed if we were to step away
and taken from this life?

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 to Love
that made us who we are,
may the “in between” of
time spent on the porch,
be left more beautiful because we were part of it.

The Shadow of the Mercy of Light

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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 in among these trees 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, “Sabbath 1985 V”

We who live in the six day world, walking the six day path to the narrow gate forget too quickly about the seventh day Sabbath. The meaning of our existence is not defined by how much we accomplish in the week, or how capable we are at carrying our burdens.

We are invited to walk through the narrow way, where worries and heavy loads cannot fit the opening.

Passing through shadow is part of reaching the light. The mercy of the shadow is — then we know light exists.

Light beyond shadow, Joy beyond tears,
Love that is greater when darkest our fears;
deeper the Peace when the storm is around,
nearer the Hope to the lost who is found.
Light of the world, ever shining, shining!

Hope in our pain and our dying. in our darkness,
there is Light, in our crying, there is Love,
in the noise of life imparting Peace that passes understanding.

Light beyond shadow, Joy beyond tears,
Love that is greater when darkest our fears;
deeper the Peace when the storm is around,
nearer the Hope to the lost who is found.
-Paul Wigmore

In a Cloud of Gold

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Photo of Aaron Janicki haying with his Oberlander team in Skagit County courtesy of Tayler Rae
Benjamin Janicki of Sedro Woolley raking hay with his team of Oberlanders

Travel as a backward step.
You journey until you find
a meadow where wildflowers
grow with pre-factory-farming
copiousness, a horse-drawn
landscape where hay is saved
in older ways, to revive
the life you lived once,
catch up with your past.
~Dennis O’Driscoll from Time Pieces (2002)

… The Amish have maintained what I like to think is a proper scale, largely by staying with the horse. The horse has restricted unlimited expansion. Not only does working with horses limit farm size, but horses are ideally suited to family life. With horses you unhitch at noon to water and feed the teams and then the family eats what we still call dinner. While the teams rest there is usually time for a short nap. And because God didn’t create the horse with headlights, we don’t work nights.
Amish farmer David Kline in Great Possessions

photo by Tayler Rae

One evening I stopped by the field to watch the hay rake
drawn toward me by two black, tall, ponderous horses
who stepped like conquerors over the fallen oat stalks,
light-shot dust at their heels, long shadows before them.
At the ditch the driver turned back in a wide arc,
the off-horse scrambling, the near-horse pivoting neatly.
The big side-delivery rake came about with a shriek—
its tines were crashing, the iron-bound tongue groaned aloud—
then, Hup, Diamond! Hup, Duke! and they set off west,
trace-deep in dust, going straight into the low sun.

The clangor grew faint, distance and light consumed them;
a fiery chariot rolled away in a cloud of gold
and faded slowly, brightness dying into brightness.
The groaning iron, the prophesying wheels,
the mighty horses with their necks like storms—
all disappeared; nothing was left but a track
of dust that climbed like smoke up the evening wind.
~Kate Barnes “The Hay Rake” from Where the Deer Are

My grandparents owned the land,
worked the land, bound
to the earth by seasons of planting
and harvest.

They watched the sky, the habits
of birds, hues of sunset,
the moods of moon and clouds,
the disposition of air.
They inhaled the coming season,
let it brighten their blood
for the work ahead.

Soil sifted through their fingers
imbedded beneath their nails
and this is what they knew;
this rhythm circling the years.
They never left their land;
each in their own time
settled deeper.
~Lois Parker Edstrom “Almanac” from Night Beyond Black.

Nearing 68, I am old enough to have parents who both grew up on farms worked by horses, one raising wheat and lentils in the Palouse country of eastern Washington and the other logging in the woodlands of Fidalgo Island of western Washington.  The horses were crucial to my grandfathers’ success in caring for and tilling the land, seeding and harvesting the crops and bringing supplies from town miles away.  Theirs was a hardscrabble life in the early 20th century with few conveniences.  Work was year round from dawn to dusk; caring for the animals came before any human comforts.  Once night fell, work ceased and sleep was welcome respite for man and beast.

In the rural countryside where we live now, we’ve been fortunate enough to know people who still dabble in horse farming, whose draft teams are hitched to plows and mowers and manure spreaders as they head out to the fields to recapture the past.  Watching a good team work with no diesel motor running means hearing bird calls from the field, the steady footfall of the horses, the harness chains jingling, the leather straps creaking, the machinery shushing quietly as gears turn and grass lays over in submission.  No ear protection is needed.  There is no clock needed to pace the day.   There is a rhythm of nurture when animals instead of engines are part of the work day.   The gauge for taking a break is the amount of foamy sweat on the horses and how fast they are breathing. It is time to stop and take a breather, it is time to start back up do a few more rows, it is time to water, it is time for a meal, it is time for a nap, it is time for a rest in a shady spot.  This is gentle use of the land with four footed stewards who deposit right back to the soil the digested forage they have eaten only hours before.

Our modern agribusiness megafarm fossil-fuel-powered approach to food production has bypassed the small family farm which was so dependent on the muscle power of humans and animals.  In our move away from horses worked by skilled teamsters,  what has been gained in high production values has meant loss of self-sufficiency and dedicated stewardship of a particular plot of ground.  Draft breeds, including the Haflinger horses we raise, now are bred for higher energy with lighter refined bone structure meant more for eye appeal and floating movement,  rather than the sturdy conformation and unflappable low maintenance mindset needed for pulling work.   Modern children are bred for different purpose as well, no longer raised to work together with other family members for a common purpose of daily survival.   Their focus at school is waning as they have no morning farm chores when they get up, too little physical work to do before they arrive at their desks in the morning.   Their physical energy, if directed at all,  is directed to competitive sports, engaged in fantasy combat rather than winning a very real victory over hunger.

I am encouraged when young people still reach for horse collars and bridles, hitch up their horses and do the work as it used to be done.   All is not lost if we can still make incremental daily progress,  harnessed together as a team with our horses, tilling for truth and harvesting hope.

photo by Joel DeWaard
photo by Joel DeWaard


I like farming. I like the work. I like the livestock and the pastures and the woods.  It’s not necessarily a good living, but it’s a good life.  I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.  That’s what I’ve spent my life doing, trying to create an authentic grounds for hope. ~Wendell Berry, horse farmer, essayist, poet, professor

To a Wild Rose

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Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose looming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
~Wendell Berry “The Wild Rose”


Due to past harsh winter weather, we have lost a couple of our hybrid rose bushes which were grafted to rootstock when we purchased them. The durable rootstock survives when the bush does not, sending up shoots and branches to thrive and bloom, opening a wild rose blossom with a fresh loveliness all its own, even if it is not the exact color, fragrance or type rose we intended originally. It is still a blessing.

Although Wendell Berry wrote “A Wild Rose” about his wife – about a moment of illumination within a long covenantal marriage – I have experienced “choosing” again “what I chose before” in a renewal of relationship and commitment with God.

I too often settle so thoroughly into routine, oblivious to the privilege of another day of living this life. I am unaware of the miracle of my own beating heart. When the scales do lift from my eyes, I see beauty emerge from the shadows, and I am renewed.

In my own marriage, our relationship has survived over four decades through good and difficult times. Yet we are grafted to a rootstock God who never gives up.

And so we bloom from and for Him – a wild and unforgettable blessing.