Farewell Wendell Berry

I and many others mourn the loss of Wendell Berry, who passed away yesterday at the age of 92. He was a writer, a poet, an advocate, but most of all, he was a humble farmer from Kentucky. His writing challenges all of us to be closer to the earth, to question progress, to pursue a simple life, and to love deeply.

If you haven’t read Wendell Berry, I highly recommend both his poetry and his essays. Anything you can get your hands on. I also recommend watching the film Look & See, a portrait of Wendell Berry, but also a look of what rural America is losing through big agriculture. Every time I watch it I feel compelled to be an organic farmer, and to be honest I wish to be one someday.

Farewell Wendell Berry, you live a full life, and you will be missed.

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…

The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

– Wendell Berry, Work Song Part II - A Vision