Tag: Wendell Berry

The Health of Self-Forgetfulness

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begoniared

The nail of each big toe was the horn of a goat.  Thick as a thumb and curved, it projected down over the tip of the toe to the underside.  With each step, the nail would scrape painfully against the ground and be pressed into his flesh.  There was dried blood on each big toe. 

It took an hour to do each big toe.  The nails were too thick even for my nail cutters.  They had to be chewed away little by little, then flattened out with the rasp, washed each toe, dried him off, and put his shoes and socks back on.  He stood up and took a few steps, like someone who is testing the fit of a new pair of shoes. 
“How is it?”
“It don’t hurt,” he said, and gave me a smile that I shall keep in my safety deposit box at the bank until the day I die.
I never go to the library on Wednesday afternoon without my nail clippers in my briefcase.
You just never know.
~Richard Seltzer from “Toenails” from Letters to a Young Doctor

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I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valleyside,
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 even I may step
forth and be free.
– Wendell Berry from “Sabbath Poems”

 

brightnight

Whenever I lose perspective about what I’m trained to do
and who I am meant to serve,
when I wallow in the mud of self-importance
rather than in the health of self-forgetfulness~

I wash out a plug of wax from a deaf ear
and restore hearing
or clip someone’s crippling toenails
so they can step forth in freedom.

I’ve been given these tools for a reason
so need to use them.
You just never know.
.

royalannejune

 

 

The Headed Grass

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Light and wind are running
over the headed grass
as though the hill had
melted and now flowed.
~Wendell Berry “June Wind”

It will soon be haying time, as soon as another stretch of clear days appears on the horizon.  We missed a haying window last week, and now are staring at 10 days of forecast rain and clouds.

The headed grass is growing heavier, falling over, lodged before it can be cut, with the undulations of moist breezes flowing over the hill.   It has matured too fast, rising up too lush, too overcome with itself so that it can no longer stand.  It is melting, pulled back to the soil.  We must work fast to save it.

The light and wind works its magic on our hill.  The blades of the mower will come soon to lay it to the ground in green streams that flow up and down the slopes.  It will lie comfortless in its stoneless cemetery rows, until tossed about by the tedder into random piles to dry, then raked back into a semblance of order in mounded lines flowing over the landscape.

It will be crushed and bound together for transport to the barn, no longer bending but bent, no longer flowing but flown, no longer growing but grown and salvaged.

It becomes fodder for the beasts of the farm during the cold nights when the wind beats at the doors.   It melts in their mouths, as it was meant to, as we are meant to melt and flow.

Truly.

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All the Things That Got in the Way

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In all the woods that day I was
the only living thing
fretful, exhausted, or unsure.
Giant fir and spruce and cedar trees
that had stood their ground
three hundred years
stretched in sunlight calmly
unimpressed by whatever
it was that held me
hunched and tense above the stream,
biting my nails, calculating all
my impossibilities.
Nor did the water pause
to reflect or enter into
my considerations.
It found its way
over and around a crowd
of rocks in easy flourishes,
in laughing evasions and
shifts in direction.
Nothing could slow it down for long.
It even made a little song
out of all the things
that got in its way,
a music against the hard edges
of whatever might interrupt its going.
~John Brehm “Passage”

mejierwaterfall

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.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.
~Wendell Berry “The Real Work”

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Who among us knows with certainty each morning
what we are meant to do that day
or where we are to go?
So we make our best guess by
putting one foot ahead of the other as we were taught
until the day is done and it is time to rest.

For me, I wake baffled each day
that I am allowed
to eavesdrop on heartbeats,
touch tender bellies,
sew up broken skin,
listen to tears.

I wake humbled with commitment
to keep going even when too tired,
to offer care even when rejected.
to keep trying even if impeded.

It is only then I learn
thing that get in the way
slow but cannot stop
the flow of time,
overflowing its banks with music
of uncertain certainty–
my real work and journey
through life.

May I wade in deep~ listening~ready to sing along.

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Now and Now and Now

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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 …
a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present…
~Wendell Berry

_____________________

My days are filled with anxious people, one after another after another.  They sit at the edge of their seat, struggling to hold back the flood from brimming eyes, fingers gripping the arms of the chair, legs jiggling.   Each moment, each breath, each rapid heart beat overwhelmed by panic-filled questions:  will there be another breath?  must there be another breath?   Must this life go on like this in fear of what the next moment will bring?

The only thing more frightening than the unknown is the knowledge that the next moment will be just like the last.  There is a serious gratitude deficiency going on here, a lack of recognition of a moment just passed that can never be retrieved and relived.   There is only fear of the next and the next so that the now and now and now is lost forever.

Their worry and angst is contagious as the flu.
I mask up and wash my hands of it throughout the day.
I wish a simple vaccination could protect us all from unnamed fears.

I want to say to them and myself:
Stop.  Stop this.  Stop this moment in time. Stop and stop and stop.
Stop expecting some one, some thing or some drug must fix this feeling.
Stop being blind and deaf to the gift of each breath.
Just stop.
And simply be.

I want to say:
this moment is ours,
this moment of weeping and sharing
and breath and pulse and light.
Shout for joy in it.
Celebrate it.
Be thankful for tears that can flow over grateful lips
and stop holding them back.

Stop me before I write,
out of my own anxiety,
yet another prescription
you don’t really need.

Just be–
and be blessed–
in the now and now and now.

 

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The Tenderness of Mortals

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How joyful to be together, alone

as when we first were joined
in our little house by the river
long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;
and now instead of two stories fumbling
to meet, we belong to one story
that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness
of mortals, who know themselves:
how joyful to feel the heart quake

at the sight of a grandmother,
old friend in the morning light,
beautiful in her blue robe!
~Wendell Berry “The Blue Robe”

 

Not grandparents (yet) but after 34 years together, we are gray enough and have earned enough wrinkles and sags to know well each other and the familiar landscape we occupy together.

So good to know our hearts still quake with the tenderness of mortals growing old together!

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Sacrificial Living

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abuliton

No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.
Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.
We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality.
~Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace

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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

herbaceous

thistle715

I was told once that I write of sacramental living — touching and tasting the holiness of everyday moments, as if they are the cup and bread of life.  I let that feedback sit warmly beside me, like a welcome companion during the many hours when I struggle with what to share here.

It is now apparent to me it is all too tempting to become the sacrament rather than the sacrifice.  As much as I love the world and the beauty in the moments I find here, my search should be for those “thin places” between heaven and earth, for forgetting self and stepping forth from a holy threshold into something far greater —  where ego, like gravity, can no longer confine and weigh down.

There is freedom in the sacrificial life, a wonderful terrifying illuminating freedom, still far beyond my grasp.  But I’m looking at where and how to reach for it.

sunsetnatetomomi

A Continuing Miracle

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The miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine – which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.
~Wendell Berry

In our travels over the last week, we have seen many remarkable continuing miracles, some large and some very small, almost missed in the splendor of the extraordinary.  We breathe in the ordinary, in order not to forget.

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Resting in a Keeping Not My Own

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treehousesunset

dawn7250

These glowing leaves made of the light a place
That time and light would leave.  The wind came cool,
And then I knew that I was present in
The long age of the passing world, in which
I once was not, now am, and will not be,
And in that time, beneath the changing tree,
I rested in a keeping not my own.
~Wendell Berry from “The Sky Bright after Summer-Ending Rain”

How briefly we stay here, mere shadows,
how transient our breath and pulse,
knowing all that was, or is, or will be
rests in You, abides in You, is kept by You.

 

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Awaiting His Arrival: From Hidden to Known

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So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
Luke 2: 16-19

 

Her fate seizes her and brings her
down. She is heavy with it. It
wrings her. The great weight
is heaved out of her. It eases.
She moves into what she has become
sure in her fate now
as a fish free in the current.

She turns to the calf who has broken
out of the womb’s water and its veil.
He breathes. She licks his wet hair.
He gathers his legs under him
and rises. He stands, and his legs
wobble. After the months
of his pursuit of her now
they meet face to face.

From the beginnings of the world
his arrival and her welcome
have been prepared. They have always
known each other.
~Wendell Berry “Her First Calf”

 

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
~Philip Larkin “First Sight”

The Peaceableness of Topsoil

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rootballsam

woods5

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil.
It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence,
and in the penetrating energy that issues
out of its peaceableness.
It increases by experience,
by the passage of seasons over it,
growth rising out of it
and returning to it,
not by ambition or aggressiveness.
It is enriched
by all things that die
and enter into it.
It keeps the past,
not as history or as memory,
but as richness, new possibility.
Its fertility is always building up
out of death into promise.
Death is the bridge or the tunnel
by which its past
enters its future.
~Wendell Berry from “The Native Hill”

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