For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do? Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred. What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Nature seems to know this and it empowers its peace and persistence. Day-blind stars will shine in the evening. The barrenness of winter gives way to spring's new life.
I'm thankful for this reminder today. Just reading this poem takes me to a place of more hope and peace inside. Visualizing the wood drake floating quietly in the still waters, seeing the great heron now standing, now feeding, a bite here, a bite there - neither one obsessing or worrying or "taxing their lives with forethought of grief" - simply being and doing what they always do.
Can I allow myself to be in that place, too? If even for a moment? Berry ends his poem with, for me anyway, a helpful reminder: "For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. We can't always live in this kind of secluded peace. Life happens, the good and the ugly, with its joy alongside despair and grief, and we often can't predict it. But I need more times to "rest in the grace of the world. Resting in the grace of the world.
Does it sound as inviting to you as it does to me? If any of you out there want to follow along, there will be a live cast of the conference available here. If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live there, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides, fields and gardens rich in the windows.
The river will run clear, as we will never know it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy. But its prescriptions and condemnations are well suited to our own complex, troubling moment.
Full health rejects the division and disintegration of culture, community, and ecology. It rejects the separation of family from family, as well as the specialized view of the self that severs body from soul—or even parts of our body from other parts. Yet we often like to see the various parts of our world as separate entities: churches, nuclear families, schools, grocery stores, office buildings, hospitals, assisted living centers and nursing homes, apartments and townhouses all subsist in detached zones.
It has taken us approximately three decades to catch up with Berry. But we are beginning to realize that he is right. The frustrations it has posed to our health-care system are likely increased by the fact that our system is extremely specialized, and likes to view the body as a machine with disparate parts, rather than as a whole in which all affects all.
But the entirety of the COVID pandemic has served to remind us that our health is predicated on each other: individuals grappling with anxiety and depression while shelter-in-place orders continue surely have felt their dependence in a new, sharp way.
The elderly, divorced from the rest of society in specialized nursing homes, are both at increased danger for this virus, and the most likely to suffer from intense loneliness. Children required by their schools to complete lessons online are cut off from the natural world and spring weather beyond their front doors, chained to a screen until their assignments are complete.
It is not just because we share a fallen, broken reality. It is also because the health of each piece of this world affects every other piece. To lack empathy, care, or love for the destruction of one part of our world is both selfish, and unselfconscious: it reveals that we believe we are somehow separate from the fate of our fellow creatures, or of our shared earth.
The prevalence of this attitude has become especially clear as resistance to COVID health recommendations or shelter-in-place orders has escalated. Thinking of the world reductively, or in a radically individualistic way, makes it easy to put individual rights, freedoms, or inconveniences before collective health—because we think of ourselves as isolated and autonomous, rather than as parts of a whole.
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