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Featured Literary Artist: Wendell Berry (1934 - )
Nature, including all of human nature, is bound together – hill and hollow, woods and fields, streams and tumbling falls. Yet many of us feel increasingly disconnected from our natural world. Super-highways, well-equipped office towers, mega-stores and shopping malls dominate our landscapes. We glimpse the land of our soul through the windshield of our automobiles, buzzing to and from work. But not Wendell Berry. Not this gifted Kentucky born writer named “prophet of rural America” by the New York Times. Berry retreated from his urban jungle to seek The Peace of Wild Things at his ancestral farm. His job became the land, and the land, his poetry.
Berry, a highly acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist, moved from New York City in 1963 after teaching at Stanford and NYU. He accepted a position at the University of Kentucky, which enabled him to return home to Henry County, and his 125-acre family farm. His first thought was to turn the farm into a vacation place. But the ailing land longed to be nurtured, as did this poet’s soul. He moved his family in, started milking the cows, and chose to use horses to plow his fields instead of “exhaust-stinking, engine-roaring, gas-guzzling tractors.” He was then, and still is now, one of America’s greatest environmentalists.
”The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug…” The “divine drug” of nature not only became the inspiration for Berry’s writing; it’s also become a divinity for ailing souls desperate to escape their concrete jungles. Our disconnected nature has even inspired an entire new field of psychology, termed “Ecopsychology,” by Theodore Roszak, Ph.D. Roszak suggests that there is a “synergistic relation between planetary and personal well being; that the needs of the one are relevant to the other.” Of course they are! But do we actually need psychologists to reconnect us with our land?
I know you’ve managed to make earthly connections without seeking professional help. You’ve allowed calm breezes and fragrant pines to soften the distress you carried into the woods. You’re heartbeat found the pulse of a rhythmic stream as you waded in her crystal waters. Rich, moist soil salved your weary bones as you planted seeds deep into the earth. You accepted the earth’s glorious gifts as she nurtured you back to life. But have you returned her favors lately? Are you remembering to nurture her?
Wendell Berry’s poetry is an empowering source to help us remember to nurture our critical relationship between hill, hollow, and humankind. “Nothing exists for its own sake but for a harmony greater than itself which includes it. A work of art which accepts this condition and exists upon its terms honors the creation and so becomes a part of it.” We’re intimately connected to Mother Earth. Not separate from her, even though it may feel like it when we’re stuck in our office towers or trapped in our “exhaust-stinking, engine-roaring, and gas-guzzling” cars.
 A wood drake graced my path yesterday as I walked along Peachtree Creek in Atlanta. His timing was poignant, freeing me to experience The Peace of Wild Things amidst the urban sprawl. May Wendell Berry’s piece, grace you now.
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.
 Read more of Wendell Berry’s peaceful poems in Selected Poems, 1957 – 1982 or immerse yourself in Recollected Essays, 1965 – 1980.” For Berry’s latest collection of short stories, explore That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, published earlier this year. www.amazon.com.
To develop a deeper understanding of Ecopsychology, visit the International Community for Ecopsychology at www.ecopsychology.org or read the book, ECOPSYCHOLOGY: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak.
Read Nature’s Path to Inner Peace, a Psychology Today article that highlights one man’s experience of Ecopsychology in the Costa Rican rainforest.
www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20010701-000026.html
Allow Phyllis to guide you on A Journey of YOUR Choosing, via a group tele-forum designed to set you on an accelerated course of personal and / or professional change in 2005. Phyllis’ book serves as our discussion guide. Wednesdays, Jan 19, 26 and Feb 2, 9, 16, and 23: 8:00 - 9:00 p.m. EDT. $120 buys you a gift of choice! Sign up with a friend by Dec 17 for the discounted price of $99 each. For information or to register, contact Phyllis Carrera at pcarrera@humanarts.biz or call her at 404-352-0340. Gift certificates available.
Around-the-World Appetizers, Georgia Grill, Atlanta, Dec 2, 6 – 8 pm.
Join Phyllis for a delicious sampling of great Southwestern food and learn about her inaugural Women’s World Journey to Taos and Santa Fe, NM, March 16-20. Free, except for food & drink. Visit www.journeyofmychoosing.com/Events.aspx to sign up.
Women’s World Journeys: Pioneering Women Travel the Southwest, Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico , March 16 – 20, 2005. Starting at $749.
Craft a “journey of your choosing” in the Land of Enchantment with inspirational guide Phyllis Carrera and an intimate group of like-minded women from around the world. Your customized travel itinerary blends distinctive special events with optional activities, so you never feel locked into a tour group. Our theme, Pioneering Women, invites you to explore the “her-story” of a beautiful land enriched with Native American culture, Spanish Colonial influence, and some of the best boutique hotels, southwestern cuisine, art galleries and shopping in the world. Click here to visit the new “travel” section of Phyllis’ “Journey” website.
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Peace. May he waken not too late from his wraths to find his window still clear in its wall, and the world there.
Wendell Berry
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the world bring on me the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know my little light taken from me into the seed of the beginning and the end…
Wendell Berry
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
Mother Teresa
Land is text, and meaning is found everywhere…
David Abram
All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess of power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.
Wendell Berry
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