The Peace of Wild Things

Earlier today while taking a short break from preparing for my upcoming MFA residency in Louisville, I was cleaning up the kitchen – while listening to National Public Radio’s Speaking of Faith – and the announcer mentioned that a Wendell Berry poem would be featured in the next segment. Having been assigned some Wendell Berry prose to read in advance of this month’s residency, I turned up the volume and looked forward to hearing the poem. This is the poem Krista Tippett, the show’s host, read:

The Peace of Wild Things

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, "The Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998.

Wow. Indeed. And all that.

This reminds me so much of what I’ve been reading lately, most especially the works of Eckhart Tolle. It also calls to mind the following well known Biblical verse: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Matt. 6:28-29)

Berry writes of the “wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief.” Isn’t it interesting that he writes “of” grief rather than the more expected (and, I suppose, more pedestrian) “or” grief? And the idea of “not taxing” one’s life is precisely what Tolle is talking about when he counsels that we should live in the present moment in a spirit of acceptance; for, what is is. And there’s really little we can do to change that. What we can control is what action(s) to we take or not take in response to what is.

The “day-blind stars/waiting with their light” that Berry writes about remind me of Tolle’s reminder that even on a cloudy day, the sun is still there. We simply are not able to see it.

Thank you Mr. Berry. Thank you Ms. Tippett for reading this on today’s program. And thank you wild things for demonstrating peace and living in the now and accepting things as they are each and every day.

Namaste.