I love Wendell Berry. Some of you know, I've been 'praying' a poem that he wrote for a while, now, just livingbreathinglearning it every day. ("What we need is here.") Then over the holidays, in Louisville, I perused a new collection of his poems, The Mad Farmer Poems, that was just lovely. Two nights ago I started reading his essay Life is a Miracle, which, the first night I started it, gave me sweet peaceful sleep and has kept my mind sharp and awake ever since. I like the way he speaks-- it is speaking, more than writing. We see eye-to-eye on lots (the sanctity of soil and farms and wild spaces, the importance of paying attention, the awareness that what we need is here) but he challenges me in big ways, too. Here's a poem of his that Annie sent this morning. Happy reading.

VII

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

"VII" from the poem "1994" by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997. © Counterpoint, 1998.