Wendell Berry died this week, at ninety-two. I never sat across a table from him. Never shook his hand. What I do have are a couple of personal letters we exchanged a decade ago, and a shelf full of worn-out books.
It’s an odd kind of grief…mourning someone you never met face to face. But it’s grief nonetheless. For, with words, stories, and those many, many poems…he shaped so much of how I see life and the world we all live in.
I have a handful of his poems memorized. And they often show up in me the way a Sunday hymn from my childhood sometimes shows up unexpectedly humming in my throat. Wendell’s words usually show up when I’m standing at the edge of a foggy bog or beside a singing stream. It seems that’s what his best lines do. They don’t wait to be invited. They practice resurrection.
But if I had to highlight just one sentence among the thousands that has done more to rearrange my actual life than any other, it’s this one:
“I will purge my mind of the airy claims of church and state, and observe the ancient wisdom of tribesman and peasant, who understood they labored on the earth only to lie down in it in peace. I will serve the earth and not pretend my life could be better served.” – Farming: A Handbook
I don’t know that I will ever be able to fully explain what that sentence did to me when I first read it. I only know that something in me recognized it as fully true before I had the language or experience to say why. It gave me permission and the courage to stop pretending that serving the idea of a good and grounded life could substitute for the actual, dirt-under-the-fingernails work of living one.
Through Berry, I also learned that the life I wished for would never just be arrived at. It’s always cultivated. Intentional. Unpredictable. For life, like love, can’t be declared once and left to unfold itself. It must be nurtured, season after season, moment after moment, the way you’d care for anything you actually want to keep alive.
I also learned to respond to beauty with a pause button…for when something stops you in your tracks, you should take the time to soak it in.
And I learned that every once in a while…you’re lucky enough to find a kindred other. Perhaps a neighbor, a friend, or a stranger that crosses your path. The kind of person whose silent presence is as comfortable as their conversation. And when you stumble into such friendship or conversation, you should waste as much time in it as you possibly can. Not time that you can later account for on a punchcard. Just untracked time while walking together among the trees. Or sitting on a porch, watching a flock of turkeys stroll by who have nowhere better to be and nothing better to do than walk and talk the day away, same as you.
Yes, I think that’s the last and the best thing Berry taught me: that a wasted morning, spent with the right person in the right place, is not wasted at all. And it might even be the whole point.
Shane Ash 