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This page has absolutely nothing to do with hydrangeas. Click the BACK button to avoid it.
Or, read on to get a bit of the wisdom of Wendell Berry, quoted here from his writings over the past 50 years. I first read him in the initial Whole Earth Catalog, c. 1966, -- a poem tucked in among articles long forgotten. But I tore out the page with his poem, folded it, and carried it in my wallet until it distintegrated hoping to find another poem, something more from him. It led to collecting his work ever since.
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"Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
-- Wendell Berry
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“I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”
-- Wendell Berry
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"I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always towards wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God."
from Health is Membership, 1994
Wendell Berry
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". . .We live in a fallen world by the dangerous presumption that we are unfallen. Only a nation that is conscious of its own guilt can change and renew itself. We are guilty of grave offences against our fellow men and against the earth, but we have not admitted that we are. . .
Even if one is disposed to believe in our innocence, it must be acknowledged that the question is of the sort that a moral people ought to be willing to bear against itself and to make the occasion of a strenuous self-appraisal. . .
It must be a sort of natural law that any increase in man's strength must involve a lengthening of his shadow; as we grow in power we are pursued by an ever-growing darkness. . . It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing. The answer to big government is not private freedom, but private responsibility.
-- Wendell Berry, The Loss of the Future, 1971
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“As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are thieves.”
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"Even in a country you know by heart
it's hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going."
"Traveling at Home", from Collected Poems 1957-1982.
Wendell Berry
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"The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as a "person." But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money."
--The Total Economy, 2000
Wendell Berry
(Super-PAC's set loose by the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 -- a decade after Berry published The Total Economy -- are a direct result of the confusion Berry clearly understands between humans and business combines. The Court hasn't such a clear mind.)
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"Anybody half awake these days will be aware that there are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels, and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith. They appear to know precisely the purposes of God, and they appear to be perfectly assured that they are now doing, and in every circumstance will continue to do, precisely God's will as it applies specifically to themselves. They are confident, moreover, that God hates people whose faith differs from their own, and they are happy to concur in that hatred."
'The Burden of the Gospels'
from The Way of Ignorance, 2005
Wendell Berry
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"Can we understand ourselves as creatures of limited and modest intelligence? Can we control ourselves?
We are by nature creatures of faith, as perhaps all creatures are; we all live by counting on things that cannot be proved. As creatures of faith, we must choose either to be religious or to be superstitious, to believe in things that cannot be proved or to believe in things that can be disproved.
Because we are human, we don't have the happiness of choosing always between good and evil. Sometimes we must choose between two evils, and I don't recommend turning away from anybody in that predicament. Because our life does not always offer us clean-cut choices between good and evil, we are going to need forgiveness. And I believe in the possibility of forgiveness, as I believe in the possibility of just remorse."
-- The Conservation of Nature & the Preservation of Humanity, 1995.
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