Skip to Navigation Youtube Instagram

" The songs of our ancestors

are also the songs of our children "

The Druid Way

The Peace of Wild Things

June 26th, 2010

The latest edition of the beautifully produced and inspiring Resurgence magazine arrived today. In it was this poem by Wendell Berry:

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.

Wendell Berry

7 Responses to “The Peace of Wild Things”

  1. A welcome reminder to take time to relax into summer’s simple delight and to let worries and daily stresses fall away. Thank you. 🙂

  2. I love the poems of Wendell Berry. have you come across his The Vision?

    If we will have the wisdom to survive,
    to stand like slow-growing trees
    on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
    if we will make our seasons welcome here,
    asking not too much of earth or heaven,
    then a long time after we are dead
    the lives our lives prepare will live
    there, their houses strongly placed
    upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
    rich in the windows. The river will run
    clear, as we will never know it,
    and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
    On the levels of the hills will be
    green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
    On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
    the old forest, an old forest will stand,
    its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
    The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
    Families will be singing in the fields.
    In their voices they will hear a music
    risen out of the ground. They will take
    nothing from the ground they will not return,
    whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
    native to this valley, will spread over it
    like a grove, and memory will grow
    into legend, legend into song, song
    into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
    the songs of its people and its birds,
    will be health and wisdom and indwelling
    light. This is no paradisal dream.
    Its hardship is its possibility

  3. Hi Philip

    lovely to hear you talk, its like the sound of the waters of the white spring… beautiful thanks.
    re the talk ‘beyond belief’ …

    love the bit about the crop circles and then love WOW! I’m a fan. See i’m spreading out…

Comments are closed.