I “discovered“ Wendell Berry several years ago after reading about him in a newspaper or a magazine article, or maybe it was a 60 Minutes segment on TV. It’s been so long ago I can’t remember exactly how I happened upon him and to begin to appreciate his poetry.
As NPR describes him: Novelist and poet Wendell Berry spent his life farming his land for food and for prose. It was land his family farmed and lived on for seven generations before him, in Henry County Kentucky.
No doubt, his most noted poem is The Peace of Wild Things:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Over the last decade+, I’ve made a concerted effort to visit as many of the US National Parks as I possibly can. Of the 63, I’ve managed to spend time in 26 to date.
On a visit to Yosemite in June 2016, I snapped the photo at the top of this post. As I described it at the time, …this small meadow tucked away at Crane Flat seemed to me to epitomize the bucolic nature of the Park. It also brings to mind the words of that poem!
I recently learned of Wendell Berry’s death on August 31, 2026, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky at age 92. May he rest in the grace of the world, and be free.