[…]
And I have dreamed
of the morning coming in
like a bird through the window
not burdened by a thought.
the light a singing,
as I had hoped.
[…]
– Wendell Berry, from “The Design of The House: Ideal and Hard Time” from New Collected Poems
Tag: Wendell Berry
Saturday Morning: You think you’ll never forget.
Our first major snowfall arrived overnight.
…soon will the winter be on us, snow-hushed and heavy. (Sara Teasdale)
…suppose we did our work like the snow, quietly, quietly, leaving nothing out. (Wendell Berry)
…The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget… (Wendell Berry)
32 years and counting.
It’s 5′ x 7′, that is five by seven feet. Unlike contemporary, machine-made models, which are much shorter and cheaper to produce, there is ample cover to reach the tippy-toes of my 6′ 1″ frame.
It has survived 32 winters.
It has served 6 homes, and is now working its 7th.
It has outlasted 10 automobiles.
And, yet here it is, working, in pristine condition, with a new car smell.
Besides our tableware, which should be replaced, it is the only wedding gift that has survived. She has long since passed, but her afghan lives on.
Is an afghan knitted or crocheted? Are they stitches or loops? I have no idea.
Eric calculated 38,260 individual loops. 38,260 hand made loops.
It is brown, green, and two shades of blue. Why these colors? The earth? Its plants and forests? Her hope for a God, for heavens? Why didn’t you ask her when she lived? Continue reading “32 years and counting.”
The Sunday morning silence comes at last.
The sounds of engines leave the air.
The Sunday morning silence comes at last.
At last I know the presence
of the world made without hands,
the creatures that have come to be
out of their absence.
Calls of flicker and jay fill the clear air.
Titmice and chickadees feed
among the green and the dying leaves.
Gratitude for the gifts of all the living
and the unliving,
gratitude which is the greatest gift,
quietest of all,
passes to me through the trees.
~ Wendell Berry, Sabbaths, 2007 XI
Credits:
- Poem: Thank you Steve @ Anderson Layman’s Blog.
- Photo from National Geographic. “Autumn’s grandeur spreads across Eagle Lake on Mount Desert Island, one of several coastal islands that make up Acadia National Park in Maine. Eagle Lake, which supplies water to nearby Bar Harbor, is deep, clear, and relatively free of plant life.”
The Vacation
Excerpt from wsj.com: “Have You Twittered Away Your Summer” by Danny Heitman:
“…As a veteran journalist, I’d be wary of following Twain’s example in disregarding an editorial deadline. But his larger point—that savoring the sheer joy of travel is more important than documenting it—resonates with special urgency these days, as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram compel us to chronicle every moment of a journey in real time. Can this kind of reportorial obsession destroy the very moment we’re trying to capture? Wendell Berry, writing a generation ago, thought that it could. In “The Vacation,” a poem published in his 1994 collection, “Entries,” Berry considers a tourist intent on faithfully recording his seasonal getaway:
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which the sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. . . .
And so the poem continues, with Berry’s exacting traveler translating each fleeting moment of his sojourn into the comfortable permanence of videotape. He’s so busy filming his day, though, that he forgets to live it. “With a flick of the switch, there it would be,” Berry writes of this homemade travelogue. “But he would not be in it. He would never be in it…”
Read more @wsj.com: “Have You Twittered Away Your Summer“
Image Source: Travel & Leisure. Photo courtesy of @danielkrieger: Halfeti along the Euphrates river in Turkey