Farmer with a Pitchfork by Winslow Homer
“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
‘Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.’
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
–Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Happy Birthday, Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934)–American novelist, poet, environmental activist, and farmer!
February is a month for catching up on dormant needlepoint projects,
Progress!
organizing drawers,
and reading
I am almost finished with Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter and I highly recommend it.
“As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or is it Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love…do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn’t.”
What have you been doing?
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell BerryWhen despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in 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 with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I especially like the line about taxing our lives with “forethought of grief.” Why do we do that? Lord, help me to rest in the grace of the world!
dual personalities 