Field work: Remembering Wendell Berry
with Wendell & Tanya Berry, at their home at Lanes Landing Farm, KY; 2016
Yesterday, August 31st 2026, Wendell Berry passed on from this earth, his convergent heaven. A seamlessness of being and shadowless Light greeted him through the door that awaits all of us. We have lost a prophetic voice, a sage, a national treasure, arguably more by how he lived as what he wrote. When I first heard about him, quoted many times by Eugene Peterson at a 1999 conference, I immediately bought my first Wendell novel, Remembering, and then a collection of sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir. There was a soulful resonance palpable, and I was forever hooked. And more than that, he quietly but profoundly shaped the second half of my life and how I work. I wrote him a note of gratitude in 2006 and sent it off to a rural PO box, surely a proverbial ‘note in a bottle’ in a vast sea, but a needed personal gesture. (Wendell has no website, email or digital presence. He farms and writes, and cultivates neighborliness.) Incredulously, five days later a handwritten note from Wendell was in my mailbox. A decade later, I wrote again, with the wistful hope that I might reach him and boldly ask if he might entertain a short personal visit and conversation. Another note of response was in my box saying: yes, pick a Sunday afternoon (!). Without hesitation, Sarah and I scheduled a ‘pilgrimage’ road trip in May with 2 of our dear friends and spiritual elders.
Some notes and pictures from our trip are below.
Also 3 of Wendell’s poems, selected for this occasion as included at the end as well.
May Wendell’s words and work expand to a new generation of spiritual stewards and conservators of life and land.
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Dear friends, June 10th, 2016
Many of you have asked to hear about our travels to see author Wendell Berry at his Kentucky farm. It was indeed a special, perhaps once in a lifetime, 'pilgrimage' to see Wendell and his wife Tanya. After an exchange of several handwritten letters, the Berry's invited us, and our dear friends Larry and Judy Hill, for a Sunday afternoon visit from 3 to 6 on May 22nd. They are 82 now and still farm 125 acres with help from family and community, far from the big city and any desire for notoriety.
Here are some impressions and notes from our trip, along with a few pictures of memories shared along the way with friends.
From the start, when I wrote Wendell last February, it was a trip with a purpose: to simply meet him and by Our mere presence somehow thank him and honor his good work that has profoundly and prophetically shaped someone like us. It was a ‘pilgrimage’ to see him in his local environs, the very place of which he writes, farms, and lives locally with understated grace, a sense of sacredness of place.
By means of the imagined place, over the last 50 years,
I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood
as a place unique in the world,
a work of God,
possessed of an inherent sanctity that
mocks any human valuation that can be put on it.”
from essay Imagination in Place, 2004
I didn't expect that the trip itself would be a 'mountaintop' experience, or trip to see the wizard or sage. And it wasn't. We knew we were in for a simple, genuine, personal, earthy encounter when we arrived a bit early and stood in his driveway waiting, when an old Ford pickup slowly pulled up with 2 Border Collies in tow and the smudgy farm-capped old driver said “are you Pat?”. Here was Wendell.
Our time there was not disappointing in any way, mind you, but it was just six people sitting around an modest kitchen table in a modest farmhouse in the middle of Untraveled, Kentucky, respectfully and pregnantly wondering what we were all doing there and gingerly getting to know one another. We told stories, laughed, looked around at the books on shelves and a thoroughly un-updated kitchen, asked a few questions of each other, and that's about it. It was the juxtaposition of the profoundly ordinary.
Curiously, they persistently asked about the nature of my work, pastoring people outside the church in a community out of my home. Even though I told Wendell that it was primarily the connection I had made with his writings that had shaped the landscape of my work locally and relationally with neighbors, he and Tanya seemed unfamiliar at that model of work, though, to me, it had naturally flowed vocationally out of everything he was about.
Hovering over nearly everything I have written is the question
of how a human economy might be conducted with reverence,
and therefore with due respect and kindness toward everything involved. [Berry, ibid]
Wendell still has much writing "in him" of all kinds, more Port William stories, Sabbath observances in poetry, and prophetic essays on the state of food, marriage, health, farming, community, humanity, grief, grace, joy, ecological ruin, and economic misguidance.
There were only a couple specific questions that time allowed for after flowing conversation that lasted Three hours:
What are you reading? What do you re-read? What has ‘mentored’ you?, I asked.
Well…. The Bible. Shakespeare. And Faulkner-(currently, The Town).
What is your understanding of sabbath? How do you engage with it, truly? And does it inform your writing?
Well, as a farmer, Sunday is my only day. I do think sabbath can be experienced every day however. When I walk I have found that what I need to do is to: let my mind alone- I let it goes where it wants to. You can't be intentional about that.
There are many images We will be pondering about our time, for years to come. As Norman Maclean ends his novel A River Runs Through It, ‘I am haunted by waters”, and now I am haunted by the wonder of Wendell’s way. —-PRH
Now I have reached the age
of judgment giving sorrow
that many men have come to,
the verdict of regret,
remembering the world
once better than it is,
my old walkways beneath
the vanished trees, and friends
lost now in loss of trust.
And I recall myself
more innocent than I am,
gone past coming back
in the history of flaw,
except Christ dead and risen
in my own flesh shall judge,
condemn, and then forgive.
from A Timbered Choir, sabbath poems; 1988 1
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No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
From A Timbered Choir, pg. 167
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Epitaph
having lived long in time,
he lives now in timelessness
without sorrow, made perfect
by our never finished love,
by our compassion and forgiveness,
and by his happiness in receiving
these gifts we give. Here in time
we are added to one another forever.
from Entries, pg. 79.
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