Wendell Berry died yesterday.
Literary heroes were what I clung to as a teenager growing up in extreme rural Eastern KY. My hometown was just a touch larger than Berry’s, and the times were different, but his words had such an influence on me. Berry, bell hooks, Jesse Stuart, and Chris Offutt all showed me that where you lived didn’t limit the beauty of your words or the expression of yourself. They gave me pride in where I grew up in a way that I didn’t realize I needed as a teenager.
When my grandmother died, I read Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” at her funeral
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell BerryWhen 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.
This one definitely hurts.
