Wendell Berry

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
"I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

--Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong.
We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it.
We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery: we will never clearly understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.
We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front - Wendell Berry

Plant Sequoias

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

Part VII of 1994- by Wendell Berry

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

Wendell Berry

Some Further Words
by Wendell Berry

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man.
I like the world of nature despite its mortal dangers. I like the domestic world of humans, so long as it pays its debts to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven.
My purpose is a language that can repay just thanks and honor for those gifts, a tongue set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places is an "environment."
And a house for sale is not a "home."
Economics is not "science," nor "information" knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave.
A fool in a public office is not a "leader.
A rich thief is a thief.
And the ghost of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer, returns in the night to say again:
"Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore."

The world is babbled to pieces after the divorce of things from their names.

Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace.

Health is not procured by sale of medication, or purity by the addition of poison.
Science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to merchandise; it is a whoredom of the mind, and so is the art that calls this "progress."
So is the cowardice that calls it "inevitable."

I think the issues of "identity" mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.
I know a "fetus" is a human child. I loved my children from the time they were conceived, having loved their mother, who loved them from the time they were conceived and before. Who are we to say the world did not begin in love?
I would like to die in love as I was born, and as myself of life impoverished go into the love all flesh begins and ends in. I don't like machines, which are neither mortal nor immortal, though I am constrained to use them.(Thus the age perfects its clench.)

Some day they will be gone, and that will be a glad and a holy day.

I mean the dire machines that run by burning the world's body and its breath.
When I see an airplane fuming through the once-pure sky or a vehicle of the outer space with its little inner space imitating a star at night, I say, "Get out of there!" as I would speak to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.

When I hear the stock market has fallen, I say, "Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!"

I thinkan economy should be based on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft, usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole, though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body's life is its own, untouched by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time to the old. I don't want to live on mortal terms forever, or survive an hour as a cooling stew of pieces of other people.
I don't believe that life or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire the household of the human soul, and all the creatures are burning within it.

"Intellectual property" names the deed by which the mind is bought and sold, the world enslaved.
We who do not own ourselves, being free, own by theft what belongs to God, to the living world, and equally to us all.
Or how can we own a part of what we only can possess entirely?
Life is a gift we have only by giving it back again.

Let us agree: "the laborer is worthy of his hire," but he cannot own what he knows, which must be freely told, or labor dies with the laborer.
The farmer is worthy of the harvest made in time, but he must leave the light by which he planted, grew, and reaped, the seed immortal in mortality, freely to the time to come.
The land too he keeps by giving it up, as the thinker receives and gives a thought, as the singer sings in the common air.

I don't believe that "scientific genius" in its naive assertions of power is equal either to nature or to human culture.
Its thoughtless invasions of the nuclei of atoms and cells and this world's every habitation have not brought us to the light but sent us wandering farther through the dark.

Nor do I believe "artistic genius" is the possession of any artist. No one has made the art by which one makes the works of art.
Each one who speaks speaks as a convocation.
We live as councils of ghosts.
It is not "human genius" that makes us human, but an old love, an old intelligence of the heart we gather to us from the world, from the creatures, from the angels of inspiration, from the dead -- an intelligence merely nonexistent to those who do not have it, but -- to those who have it more dear than life.

And just as tenderly to be known are the affections that make a woman and a man their household and their homeland one. These too, though known, cannot be told to those who do not know them, and fewer of us learn them, year by year.
These affections are leaving the world like the colors of extinct birds, like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals, every one truly what it is: gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how to live in the places where they live.

And so I would like to be a true human being, dear reader - a choice not altogether possible now.

But this is what I'm for, the side I'm on.

And this is what you should expect of me, as I expect it of myself, though for realization we may wait a thousand or a million years.

May-August, 2001 Berry, Wendell. "Some Further Words." American Poetry Review May/Jun 2002

Wendell Berry

Willing to die,

you give up

your will, keep still

until, moved

by what moves

all else, you move.

Wendell Berry,
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

(photo credit 'Playground' CathyHartland.com)

Wendell Berry

"Everyday you have less reason not to give yourself away."

~Wendell Berry

Some of his most awesome books:
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
The Mad Farmer Poems
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Wendell Berry

Like the water of a deep stream,
love is always too much.
We did not make it.
Though we drink till we burst,
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance
it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep,
while it flows
through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us,
except we keep returning to its rich waters
thirsty.
We enter,willing to die,
into the common
wealth of its joy.
-Wendell Berry

Some of his most awesome books:
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
The Mad Farmer Poems
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

"I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will."

-Wendell Berry, from II, Sabbaths 1999, in "Given"


Some of his most awesome books:
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
The Mad Farmer Poems
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Wendell Berry

"What I stand for is what I stand on."

~ Wendell Berry

Some of his most awesome books:
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
The Mad Farmer Poems
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that you have belonged to.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

–Wendell Berry, (from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
)