I first read Wendell Berry in 1993 sitting under trees in Lyme, New Hampshire, while visiting our friends Bob and Becky. I bought a couple of his books in the Hanover Book Store, one of the best stocked booksellers I've ever had the joy of wasting a day in. Just down the road were the old Stables and the clapboard Church as quintessentially New England as you get. The novels were about farming people in rural Kentucky, and as yet I hadn't discovered his poetry. But it was plain Berry understood the the land and the weather, the rhythms of growth as sun, rain, soil and human toil coincide in agricultural fruitfulness. And he understood just as deeply the agriculture of human love and hopefulness, friendship and attentiveness, the routines and the tedium necessary to allow growth to happen, and the way we each become who we are by the relationships that nourish and prune us, and draw us to live with the best we are towards that same fruitfulness. The first seventeen years of my life were lived on farms in Ayrshire and rural Lanarkshire, with their daily rhythm of milking cows and cleaning and feeding them; ploughing, sowing and then leaving alone till the season for harvest; walking across fields, climbing fences and drystane dykes, in and out of woods, across burns and up the glens - all to our hearts' content. My dad called it stravaigin - which means to wander freely, - it's also a Restaurant in Glasgow!
So Wendell Berry's writing immediately sent strong signals, wakening memories of hard work, farmyard smells, small communities where the unasked and assumed helpfulness of independent minded neighbours created ties amongst those humble enough to offer and receive the small gifts and courtesies of a hard life shared, and where possible, eased. My love for the open air and my own sense of belonging were woven by those years into what remains a sense of freedom, an accumulated knowledge base about our countryside, and a capacity to be stopped in my tracks by any number of intimations that I am not alone. A yellow hammer's song, (photo) the sound of a breeze playing conifers like the stringed section of an orchestra, the reduction of apparent anarchy to chevron discipline as migrating geese take off from Loch Skene and fly overhead towards the coast, the unobtrusive beauty of a dog rose evolving later into the rust red roundness of ripe rosehips - "the whole earth is full of Thy glory'.
Here is the kind of poem I wish I could write - it's written by one who understands trees, his own heart, and therefore helps me likewise, to understand, to stand under, and wonder.
I Go Among the Trees
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
Comments