A colleague recently turned me in the direction of Wendell Berry’s writings, so I’ve been reading Hannah Coulter on my iPad while traveling. It’s such a quiet, easy book–one that makes me feel connected to land and family. Perhaps, so far (about halfway through), it paints too pretty a picture of Hannah’s world, but I think that’s the point–to enjoy the perspective of a woman looking back on her life and making meaning of it all. I suspect that my mother and her friends might tell similar-sounding stories and I will someday, too.
And now that I’m knee-deep in his novel-writing, I’m also exploring Berry’s poetry:
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
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.