An Colún: Seeing reality as touching the sacred
‘Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery’
AN original, sincere and important voice passed away recently, leaving us all poorer by his departure. Like the great Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry had a way of expressing himself that appealed to everyone, left-wing or right-wing, gentile, jew, non-believer, etc, etc. He appealed to the transcendent in us all, that quality in our natures which is above the divisions of the world.
Because he believed that the transcendent is within everyone, it has the potential to be expressed by everyone, and therefore, by extension, it is within everyone’s purview, everyone’s potentiality to be a Poet.
In his poem “How to be a Poet” his advice was charming and simple: “Make a place to sit down. / Sit down. Be quiet. / You must depend upon / affection, reading, knowledge, / skill...inspiration, / work, growing older, patience, / for patience joins time / to eternity…./ stay away from screens. / Stay away from anything / that obscures the place it is in. /There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places…. / make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.”
Berry was a Kentucky farmer who ploughed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays (mostly in pencil and without electric light) that expressed his poignant opinions about the life and death of rural America. He died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky on Monday August 31. He was 92. The New York Times described him as being, “Lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin and a widow’s peak reminiscent of Lincoln’s.” He wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction and argument that championed small family farms, local foods and interdependent communities, and attacked a number of different technologies, heartless agribusiness and distant government. He wrote more than a dozen novels and volumes of short stories. He invented a town, Port William, Kentucky, as a setting for generations of lives interwoven in tales of murder, alcoholism, marital discord and remembrance against a background of a rural way of life under threat. Berry recognised that across the West, government was becoming more centralised and remote while rural communities were often being dismissed as irrelevant and were being ignored.
“Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming?" he asked in one book. “And always the answer is: ‘Love. They must do it for love.’ Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children.”
He also wrote: “The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighbourhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
He also wrote: “Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery….As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness….”
Berry and Whitman both deeply attract me because they were both mystics. Whitman believed humans can experience a direct, personal union with the divine or the universe without needing religious rituals or dogmas. He rejected traditional religious ideas that separated the physical body from the spiritual soul. He believed the physical world and human body were holy. His poetry often describes sudden moments of intense awareness where time, space, and individual ego disappear, leaving only a sense of eternal peace and unity. In a similar vein, Berry in his writing treated everyday reality as a direct encounter with the sacred. To him, a humble task like farming with a horse, tending a garden, or caring for a local stream was a practical form of prayer and an act of devotion to the Creator. He believed modern industrial culture destroys the earth because it views nature merely as a resource to be used rather than a mystery to be loved. In his poem “The Peace of Wild Things” he wrote that “When despair for the world grows in me / 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 / ...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.”
Whitman wrote: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches…hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people...re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem….”