Kindred Spirits: Wendell Berry

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.


I love this poem.

And I love that there is another human-being walking the planet right now, in this case a writer named Wendell Berry, who is thinking these same thoughts, feeling these same feelings and doing these same doings- even if they were born of another place (Kentucky) and time (1968).

In the same year, 1968, Mr. Berry, who has been described as a Christian pacifist, made the following statement at the University of Kentucky regarding the War in Vietnam.

We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to 'win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the 'truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

It is startling and unnerving how deeply these words still resonate today, nearly 50 years later...