The Peace of Wild Things

Landscapes go unnoticed in the undertow of everyday confusions.

When a small worry insinuates, when the wind comes up, and a discarded bottle whistles in the gutter, when I’m unable to remember a name, and when the screen flickers and a program fails to load–in mundane anxiety and tiny losses, the earth cools to me and cloud formations fail my gaze.

No yellow lights flash–just the sense of a slow seeping ambiguity toward my own alienation…

…And so I’m grateful for a friend’s reminder of the poetry of Wendell Berry:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of 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 for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

farm_landscape

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