We’ve lost another champion of the earth.  I am feeling the loss today.  Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors and mentors.  His words have spoken to me, a farmer’s daughter, for years.  I am grateful his words are here, still on this earth, captured and preserved in his books, poetry and essays.  I will continue to return to them.

Let me tell you a little bit about Wendell Berry. Among other things, he wrote stories set in a rural town he called Port William, fashioned loosely after the place where he grew up in Kentucky. There are many novels and short stories poems that touch on the people and life of this place. The chronology of the tales stretches from the United States Civil War to 2021. Within these stories you encounter both momentous and ordinary events in the lives of the people living there. These novels are dear. I have read and re-read most of them.

He wrote with great affection and respect about creation and love and “peaceableness,” about loving the soil we walk on, about community and faith – and about the absolute importance of paying attention – he was a wonder.  Wendell Berry once said, “The only thing I try to accomplish in fiction is to show how people act when they love each other.” His words make me want to be better.

These are 2 of my very favorites:

Here are some of my favorite excerpts from Jaber Crow:

I have been led

Another thing I love about Berry’s thoughts are how he sees and understands the Next Place and our loved ones there.  I love my Dead People.  He loved his.  Wendell Berry is now a member of what he called, “the company of immortals.”

In his poem, “Rising,” I love how he describes the story of our lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.  I am imagining him now, stepping into his new beginning with his loved ones.  They have been waiting for his embrace.

“Rising” by Wendell Berry

Any man’s death could end the story:
his mourners having accompanied him
to the grave through all he knew,
turn back, leaving him complete.

But this is not the story of life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.

For those who depart from it, bearing it
in their minds, the grave is a beginning.
It has weighted the earth with sudden
new gravity, the enrichment of pain.

There is a grave, too, in each
survivor. By it, the dead one lives.
He enters us, a broken blade,
sharp, clear as a lens or mirror.

And he comes into us helpless, tender
as the newborn enter the world. Great
is the burden of our care. We must be true
to ourselves. How else will he know us?

Like a wound, grief receives him.
Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep
as part of ourselves the severe gift.
By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligences of life.
Where the tree falls, the forest rises
There is nowhere to stand but in absence,
no life but in the fateful light.

Thank you, Wendell Berry, for leaving your words, your thoughts, your insights.  They have expanded and clarified mine.  I will miss feeling you here on this side.