Wendell Berry, thank you

I am an avid poetry reader.  Passionate, even.  I know this is unusual (and not the coolest thing in the world).  I have bought poetry books, gone to readings, eagerly shared passages with friends, found myself moved to tears by the lines of others.  Poetry is language at its most essential: stripped down, bare, in flight.  I have stayed up far too late because I couldn’t put a book of poetry down.  Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton (those three women were the subject of my senior thesis in college), Stanley Kunitz,  Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Theodore Roethke, Wendell Berry.  I could go on.  But this post is about Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry, who died on August 31 at 92.  I am far from a Berry scholar, and have been reading eagerly essays by those who were.  He was a farmer and a conversationist, a writer of both essays and poetry.  His work is rich with themes of home, of meaning, of the ways the simplest of things can bespeak deep, earnest truth. I write and talk all the time about the words that live in our heads – the things we think about, unbidden, and lines of Wendell Berry’s work are in the most exalted pantheon of the those for me.

When I sat down to look through what I’ve written about Berry over the years, there is a clear theme: the rich fecundity of darkness, the need to trust it, the things that can be learned therein, and the ways in which darkness lends meaning to light.

I have worked in the same small office since 2001.  For a quarter century in that tiny room I have swum in words – read them, thought them, written them.  In all that time there has only been one set of words on the wall.  It is this short poem by Wendell Berry:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
We have come to our real work.
And when we no longer know which way to go,
We have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

I wanted to collect here the things I’ve written about Berry, about the themes I return to, about the ways his work speaks to my mind and my heart.  If I can help one more person find Berry’s luminous, gently thought provoking words then I will be happy.

Thoughts on darkness.  The idea that there is beauty and power and transformation in the darkness, even if it is scary.  That we need darkness to appreciate light.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.  To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

Gravity is grace.

The river’s injury is its shape
We are what we are given and what is taken away

Advent.  More thoughts on light and darkness, on their interconnectedness.  Leaning into that darkness, seeing that there is beauty there.  Surprising, staggering, serendipitous beauty.  Divinity buried in the drudgery.  Dark feet and dark wings.

A Darkness Full of Light.

If you are interested, the New York Times obituary of Wendell Berry is here.

 

in my head today

Live in each season as it passes.

-Thoreau, Walden

Put another way, Be Here Now (my future tattoo)

I was talking to someone yesterday about my resolute and perennial fascination about why we think of when we think of it – specifically both memories and words (lyrics, quotes, passages, poems).  I’m not sick of the topic yet.  These words are running through my mind today.

The passing of all things

Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we’ve loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, is already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings.  -Katrina Kenison

Thank you A First Sip for reminding me of this passage I love from my friend Katrina Kenison.  Photo last Friday night near our house.

Sunset, and Four Quartets, and time

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
– Burnt Norton, TS Eliot

I’ve read Four Quartets before, but not in a single sitting and not in a long, long time.  The poems leave me me breathless, speechless, seeming to touch something ineffable that I can’t put into words but that makes me nod with deep identification.

Lately, it’s about a topic I’ve returned to over and over and over again, which is the compression of time, the non-linear nature of the past and the present and, though it’s harder for me to grasp, the future.  What do I mean?  Living where I do, I dance daily with memories from both the last 24 years (Matt and I moved into this house in 2001, had and raised both of our babies here, and are still here now that they are gone) and from my own childhood (I moved around a lot as a kid but Cambridge was home, and I was born in a house half a mile from where I live now and my parents moved to a house when I was in high school that’s a mile in the other direction.  If you didn’t know about my peripatetic childhood, you would think I’d spent my entire 51 year life in a square mile of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  One thing that strikes me upon re-reading Four Quartets is that so many lines I regularly hear in my head and reflect on are from that poem.  In this case, the still point of the turning world. That’s what Cambridge is and has always been for me.

This past weekend Grace and I were talking about how darkness is falling earlier and earlier these days.  I’ve written about that too (is the story of my midlife the way certain themes will recur, over and over again, in my life and in my writing? perhaps).  She was talking about how it feels sad to sit in the office and watch dusk fall outside the window, and I had a visceral memory of being in my first job out of college, in the fall of 1996, sitting on the 31st floor and watching darkness come outside the window.  I recall the emotion she described so profoundly!  I also recall that in the years that followed I started finding the arrival of darkness in the fall less sad and more reassuring, somehow, and that that transition marked something important.

But what I’m struck by today is the universality – at least between Grace and myself – of this feeling, this awareness of the hours of day and night and how the the shifting border between them makes us feel.  I talked to Matt yesterday while he was on the west coast, and he facetimed me as he watched the sunset over the Pacific.  Using technology, across the continent, I enjoyed the sunset.  AND I marveled at the fact that my life partner knew that this would matter to me.

The interplay of light and dark is one of my most abiding themes.  You might call me a broken record.

Today I’m thinking of 22 year old me sitting in her glass high rise watching sunset gather, and of 22 year old Grace doing the exact same thing.  Time past and future both contained in time present.  No question about it.

the hard roads are the ones worth choosing

I love David Brooks’ columns for the New York Times.  He reminds me of my father, almost always.  And never more than in his most recent piece, The Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible.

Dad and I discussed many things, ad nauseum, throughout his life.  Our last conversation, on Thanksgiving 2017, was about books.  Mostly I listened to him – there was an awful lot to learn from my father, who remains the most intelligent and interesting person I’ve ever met.  The central point of conflict, if we had one, was Dad’s repeated exhortation that I find my passion.  I simply didn’t have a central animating passion in my life, and this flummoxed him.

Dad, who had a master’s on Physics, a PhD in engineering, and made his profession in consulting, had a clear passion.  It was Europe: its history, its culture, its religion, its art.  One of the most powerful experiences of my life was in Europe with Dad, when we descended to the bottom level of Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi and I found myself moved by something powerful, inchoate, inexpressible.  I stood in the basement of the Basilica, crying, unable to say what had grabbed me.  I’ve never forgotten that moment, but still, I was unable to translate that feeling into a response to the question of “what’s your passion” that Dad was forever asking me.

Brooks discusses the development of a passion, the kind of fervent love of something beyond ourselves that drives a life. He unpacks something I have personally struggled with: so much discussion of the “big” topics (in this case, passion, and in mine, memory, time, maturation, parenting) feels general and in that, generic.  Brooks is interested in the specifics, as am I.  He writes compellingly about how “…the process starts in mystery. Like falling in love, these ignition moments happen at the deepest layer of our unconsciousness,” and then discusses how the calling or vocation grows through curiosity and exposure.  I thought of Dad going to Germany on a Fulbright and then seeking out experiences in Europe (of which I was the happy beneficiary).

Eventually the craftsman loves the process, not just the product.  I think often of the Chris Stapleton line that always, viscerally, reminds me of dad: “the hard roads are the ones worth choosing.”  Dad believed in his marrow in the value of hard work and challenge, and I’ve internalized that entirely.  Carol Dweck’s assertion reminds me of Dad: “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means that you care about something.”

Oh, Dad.  Thank you for showing me by example what it is to love something outside of yourself, even if it’s not what you do to make your living.  Thank you for demonstrating the value of a rich and manifold life.  I’m still working on expressing what my passion is, but I think it’s something to do with words and expression of the universal.

You were my first and most influential teacher, on all fronts, and I think of you every hour of every day.  I’m not sure my “passion” will ever be as succinctly described as yours, but I am profoundly grateful for your example and guidance.