The Peace of the Wild Things.

[Author’s note: I wrote this essay early this morning for my red mare page. I’m putting it here as well because it has Wendell Berry in it, and love, and hope, and I think perhaps we all need those things just now.]

Tern and I go for a walk, in the stillness, with the gaudy, hopeful sound of the woodpecker to accompany us. My little bird - for she has a bird-like aspect to match her name, and I often call her Bird - has grown in ease and self, so that she sniffs her way along the paths and through the trees and her whole body is long and low and although she will stop and stare when she sees strangers in the distance who need examining, she is not looking for monsters behind every bush.

I have sudden flashes of how afraid she was when we first did these walks, and how I had to pause and wait, over and over, for her to find the courage to go on. Now I notice she is processing constantly, resetting her own nervous system with big, sloppy movements of her exquisitely pink tongue. She feels the world and she notices the potentially alarming things, but she lifts herself into boldness, and walks on, and I feel very, very proud of her.

When we return and I put her back into the field and thank her and tell her how clever she is, and how brave, I have to keep going back to the gate because she is looking so beautiful and sweet, and I need to gather one last wash of that before I go.

Then the shouting starts, far away, across the Atlantic Ocean, and for a moment, my own nervous system tells me we are all doomed. (The world does seem a very unpredictable place just now, so that I need to practice my own Bravery Walks.)

Someone, a stranger, puts up a copy of Wendell Berry’s great poem, the one that consoles me the most, and brings me back to peace, and I think: yes, the writers and the poets will have their work to do now. That is a job that means something, in turbulent times, to put out words which have truth in them, and perhaps some pattern and order too, when life seems to have no pattern or order. The writers and poets can charge into the drama head on, and write it as epic or satire, or they can go down to the river, and stay where the wild things are. They can gaze at Tern, with her gentle soul, and bring her to life on the page. Because, in the end, that is what tethers us: to life, to hope, to joy, to beauty, to all the things that matter.

Here is Berry. I lift my eyes to the mountain top - and he is a mountain peak - from where I find my strength.

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.