Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
South Wind wails in the pre-dawn dark, whistling through outstretched arms of White Pine, pushing into the coldest Air we’ve seen in years in these parts. Yesterday—blue Sky, Sun still high—I cut a fallen Willow limb from which to fashion a training yoke for Tigger and Topsy, requiring outstretched arms to be held above heart for several minutes. Cold crept creepingly into focused fingers, sending me running for a warm place to thaw my hands with some real urgency. This is dying weather for the weak and the unwell—so cried out defrosting fingers yesterday.
I offer my deepest regards to you for reading. I am always surprised when I hear—albeit infrequently—from people who report that they’ve ingested these letters regularly. Your attention translates to a sense of real responsibility here on this end, to do right by the minutes you’ll spend staring at this digital text rather than interacting with something else—anything else. May that these gathered words be in service to that anything else, to the landscapes and their resident plants, animals, waters, weathers and peoples who stagger under the weight of our modernizing lives. To the more-than-human places wondering where we ran off to in such a hurry, and where we’ve trained our gaze. The places always whispering of Home.
On this first letter of a sabbatical year, I ask: Is it possible to be of service by contributing yet more writing to a world already saturated with written words? If so, how might one begin such a journey? Is there really any new writing, or just a reconfiguring and recombining of what has been said before? If reading is a particularly human mode of listening, and writing a particularly human mode of reporting on what one has heard, then I might proceed in good faith by acknowledging those particular humans who have shaped my listening ear. A proper thank you note to the writers whose potent words took me by the ear and shook me to alertness. I remember the day I first held Wendell Berry’s seminal book, The Unsettling of America in my hands—a college student stymied by heartbreak. I pull the same copy from the bookshelf this morning, some two decades later. Berry published this poetic, prophetic polemic in 1977, three years before my birth. The pages are filled with the markings of a wide-eyed younger self. I find the following passage underlined in the chapter titled The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture. The words clearly stirred something back then, but I don’t believe I’ve read them since. I am shaken to alertness once again by the influence words can have upon a life path. Berry writes:
A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies the inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well. (1)
A thank you note is clearly in order. Twenty years overdue. The following was mailed off in handwritten form to Mr. Berry, thanks to the kind person at the Berry Center Bookstore who responded to my email to share the address where he receives mail.
With great care,
Adam Wilson
Wendell Berry as a Young Man in his Writing Cabin. Photo Credit.
A Thank You Note to Wendell Berry
Dear Mr. Berry,
I write this morning in an attempt to extend some long-overdue praise for the ways in which your labors have imprinted themselves upon my days. In the suburbs grown, I found my way during my college years to the remote villages of Nepal. A walking trip through a countryside studded with bright-eyed people living in and from their home places broke me wide open. Upon returning, a copy of your Unsettling of America started me on a walking trip through an American cultural and agricultural landscape aching for such vitality. Life force vacuumed out through the glowing screens, as you have so evocatively described(2). Your willingness to articulate the grief of our time—a time that breaks in cutting pieces all around(3)—has repeatedly cast soft light onto the broken ground at my feet. You’ve offered, until now unawares, a unique form of companionship. Some might call it elderhood. I left college for a farming apprenticeship because of your writing, and some twenty years on I’m still at it, and wondering now how I might create a place where others younger than I could seek deep apprenticeship in a time even more confounding than the one in which I sought to come of age. And never once did I sit down to properly thank you for what you’ve done. You’ve gently and not-so-gently reminded me to keep my eyes and my ears open, to proceed as if what is happening is really happening.
It is the time’s discipline to think
of the death of all living, and yet to live.(4)
You’ve ongoingly stolen my ability to go numb. And I can’t thank you enough for that.
More recently, one of your books arrived in the mail as a surprise gift. It was a few years back, right as I was beginning listen for how I could be of service as a dedicated practice. Think: asking the very question aloud daily at moments not in the company of other humans. Yes, an animist practice. And I was beginning to hear some surprising responses to this question of service, even some instructions that I could translate into actionable deeds. But how would I describe to my neighbors why I was not willing to sell any of the Lamb or Beef we produced on the Farm? Why they might consider joining us as we learned to mow Grass with a scythe? Why all the food grown and gleaned by these neighborly efforts would be offered with no charge at monthly ‘Gratitude Feasts’ served at the old Town Hall or why we would speak a blessing and sing a song together before the food was served? I needed powerful words to explain these strange invitations. Spell-breaking words. I opened the unexpected cardboard mailer which read simply “To Adam. A gift from Phillip.” I remembered Phillip, a young man studying organic farming at the local university who had joined us for our first foray into making hay by hand. I remembered that he was thoroughly heartbroken by the way things are, that he had been intrigued by the Farm’s practice of giving gifts. So apparently, he’d decided to give one. Right there on the back cover, I read a string of words that immediately began to offer guidance to the nascent Brush Brook Community Farm—itself a collection of longings just beginning to find physical form. You wrote:
We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places in the world of Nature. We seem to have no idea that the absence of such relationships, almost everywhere in our country and the world, might be the cause of our trouble. Our trouble nonetheless exists, is severe, and is getting worse. Instead of settled husbanders of cherished home places, we have become the willing parasites of any and every place, destroying the source and substance of our lives, as parasites invariably do. (5)
How, then, might we begin to remember? How will we learn to walk alongside the grief of our time without turning away, or going numb? The work of Brush Brook Community Farm has proceeded always in the presence of these questions.
I have included some recent writing that I offer as a gift, as a way of reporting from afar that your steadfast eldering exerts generative influence in these parts. Our efforts to learn to live in and from the specific place we wake each day have been instigated, or initiated, by your words. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
With great care,
Adam Wilson
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1997, p. 43.
The Gift of Good Land, 1982, pp. 157-8.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1998, p. 13.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1998, p. 64.
The Art of Loading Brush, 2017, pp. 103-4.
You’re doing mighty work Adam and your writing is an absolute pleasure to ingest. Thank you thank you thank you.