“
In a time of drastic change one can be too preoccupied with
what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In
either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but
dynamic possibilities. You do not need to know what is happening, or
exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the
possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and embrace
them with courage, faith and hope. In such an event, courage is the
authentic form taken by love.
”
- Thomas Merton,
Wendell Berry, A Warning to My Readers:
Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.
Wendell Berry, To Know the Dark:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
The Apple Tree
by Wendell Berry
In the essential prose
of things, the apple tree
stands up, emphatic
among the accidents
of the afternoon, solvent,
not to be denied.
The grass has been cut
down, carefully
to leave the orange
poppies still in bloom;
the tree stands up
in the odor of the grass
drying. The forked
trunk and branches are
also a kind of necessary
prose—shingled with leaves,
pigment and song
imposed on the blunt
lineaments of fact, a foliage
of small birds among them.
The tree lifts itself up
in the garden, the
clutter of its green
leaves halving the light,
stating the unalterable
congruity and form
of its casual growth;
the crimson finches appear
and disappear, singing
among the design.