Blooming

I dream of a quiet man

who explains nothing and defends

nothing, but only knows

where the rarest wildflowers

are blooming, and who goes

and finds he is smiling

not by his own will.

-Wendell Berry, Given Poems, Sabbaths 1999.II

I find myself getting all too wound up about stuff, even if it's only in my mind.  I mean, there's just so much frustrating and downright tragic stuff happening out there under the sun.  I'm not going to far when I say that Wendell Berry's poetry often saves me.  It saves me from insanity and shortsightedness, it saves me from dreaming vain and petty things, it reminds me that dreams and rest and natural patterns are inherently and infinitely worth my time.

Sometimes his poems represent a glimpse of an ideal, beatific state, which no one ever really achieves for more than a moment.  Those glimmers of non-dual consciousness and Christ-like surrender to the presence of God's Spirit, but without any pretense and overbearing false holiness, can pull me through dark suffering, and ground me in moments of unwarranted optimism.  Feeling like you're constantly on the defensive is not healthy.  Feeling like you constantly have to explain yourself and justify your own existence is terrible indeed.  Whatever happened to inherent value?

I think we would all be better off if we insisted on the sacred quality of human life, before we ever came to another consideration.  That's idealistic I know.  It's  a dream, but you can't utterly protect anything that is dear to you, and most of the time you will only smother and stamp out the beauty of thing or a person, when you do not allow them to earn and display their scars.

It has taken me 40 years to start to accept people as they are.  Maybe in another 40 I will be better.  Maybe then I'll know where the rarest wildflowers and blooming.

The less I judge others the better my judgment becomes.  When I do not name enemies and heretics easily, or at all, I find that truth comes more willingly to my ears and my heart.  When I surrender my will, or even just admit that I might not be completely righteous, I am free to love.

When I lay down my life, I am saved.

Someone even more insightful than Berry said that would be the case.