On Wonder & Grace

 

Another person whose life touched mine is gone.  Wendell Berry, the writer and poet whose  thoughtfulness, insights and words mattered and made a difference for good, died on Monday at his home on a farm in Kentucky. He was 92 years old. I didn’t have to agree with everything he said, to consider and appreciate the light, love and wonderment he shared and invited through the poetry and ponderings I encountered online and in the books on my shelf. 

According to his daughter, Mary Berry, “He was unfailingly gentlemanly and kind. He said the things we needed to hear, and some things that we all ought to live by, and one is that it will never be so bad that we can’t do the right thing that’s right in front of us to do”. 

To his readers, however, Wendell issued the following warning:

Do not think me gentle

because I speak in praise 

of gentleness, or elegant

because I honor the grace

that keeps this world.  I am

a man crude as any

gross of speech, intolerant

stubborn, angry, full

of fits and furies.  That I

may have spoken well 

at times is not natural

A wonder is what it is. 

On wonder, the following from him expresses the feeling that comes over me each year in the season of warmth when the fireflies are twinkling in the woods and my four foot tall garden lilies are blooming and scenting air that previously smelled of snow and frost.  

The woods and pastures are joyous

in their abundance now

in a season of warmth and much rain

we walk amidst foliage, amidst

song.  The sheep and cattle graze

like souls in bliss (except for flies)

and lie down satisfied.  Who now

can believe in winter? In winter

who could have hoped for this?

His most often quoted poem, The Peace of Wild Things can be found here. And from his prose, as recorded at The Marginalian:

"There are kinds and degrees of ignorance that are remediable, of course, and we have no excuse for not learning all we can. Within limits, we can learn and think; we can read, hear, and see; we can remember. We don’t have to live in a world defined by professional and political gibberish. But… our ignorance ultimately is irremediable… Do what we will, we are never going to be free of mortality, partiality, fallibility, and error. The extent of our knowledge will always be, at the same time, the measure of the extent of our ignorance. Because ignorance is thus a part of our creaturely definition, we need an appropriate way: a way of ignorance, which is the way of neighborly love, kindness, caution, care, appropriate scale, thrift, good work, right livelihood… The way of ignorance, therefore, is to be careful, to know the limits and the efficacy of our knowledge. It is to be humble and to work on an appropriate scale."