Wendell Berry, cont.

Finding A Place On The Earth

By Mark Powell

If the idea of personal satisfaction means that one has found life-fulfillment, then it would seem that very few these days have found satisfaction. 

The constant movement toward the next thing, the next purchase, the next experience, would, by appearances anyway, make an outside observer think that the richest nation on earth is also the most deeply unhappy, meaning that gratification and pleasure may be as elusive to us as some nearly vanished bird – something one hopes to see, but not really with much optimism.

I bring this up because of late I have been reading Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1934 in Henry County Kentucky, and is a teacher, a man of letters -- writing novels, short stories poems and essays -- and he is an economic and cultural critic. He is also a farmer. 

I do not remember how I was introduced to him, but it was probably his poetry. I do remember reading his novel, A Place On The Earth, and being powerfully effected. The prose was slow and methodical as a horse plow, and the harvest was a story that still stays with me.

But, by far, I have been most touched by his essays. Berry believes that we must somehow reconnect with the dirt, and “until we understand what the land is…and re-enter the woods…only then can we encounter silence and darkness…and a sense of the world’s longevity,…its ability to thrive without [us], of [our] inferiority to it and [our] dependence on it.

To live this way, then, means we must all become farmers?  

Hardly. 

But, Berry does assert that we must all serve the earth. This means we must envision a future that differs significantly from the urban-industrial-information times currently rending the planet. And, he insists that this new relationship with the earth must begin right now, right where we are.

Norman Wizba, in his introduction to Berry’s agrarian essays: The Art Of The Common Place, says that Berry believes that, “the path toward wholeness depends on our discovery and acknowledgment of, and the response to, a greater goodness that contextualizes us.”  He goes on to say that, “our fundamental mistake is that we have presumed to be the authors of ourselves and our destinies, and thus have forgotten or denied that we are part of ‘a great coauthorship in which we are all collaborating with God and with nature in the making of ourselves and one another.’”

Thus, if we insist on living like captains of our own providence, with an especially harsh disregard for the dirt under our feet, it will lead to great loss in our heart-wholeness. 

So, what would happen if we were to “re-enter the woods?” Berry tells us:  “Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, [we] will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is…[Our] life will grow out of the ground like other lives of the place, and take its place among them…”

And maybe then, what we “value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households,” will find  satisfaction growing in us.