Last week we lost another giant. First we lost the whimsical grace of Dolly Parton, and now we have lost America’s moral mirror. We have lost Wendell Berry.
Poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, agrarian theorist, and angry Christian. Berry’s thought transformed my own. Through his poetry and prose, I could never again imagine my relationship to the non-human world in quite the same way. He changed how I thought about place, too: about our commitment to a particular psycho-geographical region, to local knowledge, to neighbors, to the land beneath our feet, and to the communities that make a place a home.
One of Berry’s most beloved poems is “The Peace of Wild Things.” My sister gave me a copy when I returned to work after months of medical leave and a near-death experience. It had a grounding effect on me then. Now I have it hanging on my office wall.
It remains there as a reminder of the peace of ordinary life. Real life. Life lived among the natural rhythms of things.
Berry writes of going to “the peace of wild things,” and that simple phrase has stayed with me. There is something deeply Christian about the movement of the poem. When anxiety about the future becomes overwhelming, Berry does not tell us to think harder, work harder, or master our circumstances. He directs our attention outward—to the world that exists beyond the anxious self. To water. To darkness. To the stillness of creatures. To the wildness that continues without our management.
That matters to me.
Berry reminds me that I have more neighbors than just other humans.
This may be one of the great gifts of his work. Berry had a way of settling me by first doing a little unsettling. He shook me out of my habitual ways of seeing. He made the familiar strange again. He asked me to look more deeply and wonder at the glories and enchantments of life as they actually are.
I think this is why his work has mattered so much to my intellectual and spiritual life. Berry did not offer an escape from the world. He offered a deeper inhabitation of it. He taught me to pay attention to the particular: a place, a field, a tree, a meal, a neighbor, a body, a season. He resisted the temptation to treat these things as raw material for our ambitions. Instead, he taught me to receive them.
That is perhaps the word I most associate with Berry now: receive.
I have spent much of my own life learning to think about Christian faith in increasingly abstract terms. Theology asks large questions about God, creation, humanity, redemption, and the future. Berry continually brought those questions back down to earth. Literally.
He reminded me that creation is not merely an idea. It is the world we inhabit. It is the soil under our feet, the food we eat, the creatures with whom we share our lives, and the places that teach us who we are. It is also the particular place to which we belong.
And perhaps that is why “The Peace of Wild Things” has become more than a poem for me. It has become a small liturgy of attention.
I look at it on my office wall and remember that the world does not depend entirely upon my anxiety. There is a peace outside of me. There are rhythms I did not create and cannot control. There are creatures who know how to live without carrying the entire future on their backs.
Berry’s great achievement, I think, was to make such things difficult to ignore.
He unsettled our assumptions about progress, prosperity, technology, community, agriculture, economics, and even what it means to be human. But underneath the anger was a profound tenderness. He wanted us to recover the ability to love what is close at hand before it disappears.
He wanted us to stop rushing past the world.
That is a lesson I hope to keep learning.
Wendell Berry leaves behind an enormous body of work, but his deepest legacy may be the people he taught to see differently: to notice the land, to know their neighbors, to resist the abstractions that make destruction easier, and to find holiness in the ordinary.
I am one of those people.
So when I look at the poem on my office wall, I will think of my sister who gave it to me, of the strange season in which I first needed its wisdom, and of the man who spent his life reminding us that the world is more alive, more mysterious, and more sacred than our anxious imaginations allow us to see.
Thank you, Wendell Berry, for helping me learn to look again.
And for reminding me that sometimes the way back to peace is simply to become attentive to the wild, ordinary, beautiful world that has been here all along.