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Poet, environmentalist, farmer Wendell Berry died at 92.
Dear Reader,
For many years, Dot had a poem tacked to a bulletin board. It was Wendell Berry’s short but profound The Peace of Wild Things, part song of lament, part prayer. It goes like this:
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 was not just a poet, but also a scholar, a farmer, and an environmentalist. Activist and author Bill McKibben wrote that “Wendell Berry, who died yesterday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start.” He loved his rural home in Kentucky, he loved our planet, and, with his words, he invited us to love it too.
Perhaps you’ve stumbled across a Berry poem or two yourself. Maybe Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front, which gives us this crucial nudge to — even in this time of climate crisis — “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
Admiringly,
Dot
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