I awoke this morning to the news that Wendell Berry had died, and it devastated me.
Berry is one of those writers whose work has been with me for so long that I have a hard time remembering who I was before I encountered it. But I do remember where it began.
I was a senior at Wofford College, sitting in a seminar class, when I first read “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” I had never read anything quite like it. Calling the experience a Damascus Road moment probably sounds overly dramatic, but that is honestly how I remember it. Something shifted in me that sunny day in 1999 in Spartanburg, SC.
Looking back now, I can recognize it as one of those rare moments when a text does more than teach you something. It rearranges the furniture of your mind. It gives words to things you have already felt but have not yet known how to say.
I remember wondering why I had made it all the way to my senior year at a small Methodist liberal arts college in the Piedmont of South Carolina without encountering Wendell Berry.
Maybe that question mattered almost as much as the poem itself.
Here was someone writing about land and economics and Christianity and farming and politics and affection as though these things had never really been separate. Here was a writer insisting that where we live matters, that what we eat matters, that the health of soil matters, that the scale of things matters, that the work of our hands matters, and that none of those questions can finally be separated from questions about what kind of people we are becoming.
I have read that poem hundreds of times since then. I still return to it almost weekly. The final instruction… “Practice resurrection” has been sitting in the footer of this website since 2003.
And if I ever get another tattoo, there is a very good chance it will be Practice Resurrection or Berry’s fox:
“Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.”
That line has become something like a spiritual discipline for me.
Make the tracks. Follow the strange trail. Pay attention to what does not seem efficient. Allow yourself to wander. Do not let the people selling efficiency convince you that efficiency is the highest human good.
And, every once in a while, go in the wrong direction.
Berry wasn’t “just” an environmental writer, which is part of what made him so important. He wasn’t only an academic, although he taught at the Univ of Kentucky. He wasn’t an activist in our conventional sense, although he protested more effectively than those of us who have held up clever signs in big cities during marches with thousands of other humans. He was not simply a poet or essayist or novelist or farmer… although he was all of those things.
He was stubbornly difficult to divide into categories because the world he was trying to describe could not be divided that way either.
He understood “conservation” in something closer to its older meaning. To conserve something is not merely to protect an abstract entity called Nature somewhere over there. It is to learn how to inhabit a place well enough that its life can continue.
That requires affection, limits, and memory.
And it requires staying put long enough for a place to teach you something.
One of the great lessons I took from Berry is that the most important journey is not necessarily measured in miles. Sometimes the great journey is downward: the slow movement into a few inches of soil, into the history of a creek, into the names of trees, into the particular people and creatures with whom we have been given a life.
Home, in that sense, is not merely where we return after traveling.
Home is something we learn how to inhabit.
Much of the work I am doing now in Religion and Ecology (a field for which I view him as a patron saint, although he would probably call that blasphemy), including my dissertation work, keeps arriving at that question of place. What does it mean that consciousness is always consciousness somewhere? What does it mean that theology happens in watersheds? What does it mean that a creature is never simply an isolated object but exists among soils, histories, bodies, other creatures, weather, memory, and time?
Those questions have taken me through phenomenology, metaphysics, ecology, and Christian theology.
But Wendell Berry was there first.
Long before I had the language of ecological intentionality, before Edith Stein or Merleau-Ponty entered into this work, Berry had already taught me something fundamental: perception and belonging cannot finally be separated.
You learn a place by loving it.
And you learn yourself differently when you begin to understand yourself as belonging to a place.
Modern life is remarkably good at hiding this from us.
We talk about “the cloud,” as though our photographs and emails float somewhere above us rather than being stored in buildings that occupy land, consume electricity, draw water, and require enormous material infrastructure.
We talk about “the grid,” as though electricity were an abstraction rather than something produced somewhere, transported across landscapes, and entangled with particular rivers, mountains, mines, forests, farms, and communities. Even our food appears beneath fluorescent lights as though it originated on a grocery-store shelf. Berry spent a lifetime reminding us to look behind these abstractions.
Where did this come from?
Who made it?
What soil grew it?
What community bears its cost?
What happens to the place after we have taken what we wanted from it?
Those are ecological questions. They are economic questions. They are political questions.
I increasingly believe they are theological questions as well.
Berry helped me see that theology, ecology, and place are not three different subjects that occasionally happen to overlap. They are different ways of approaching the same ancient human problem: how are we to live here, together?
Our scriptures and political traditions are full of arguments about belonging, inheritance, exile, land, neighbor, stranger, household, commonwealth, wilderness, garden, and home. We tend to abstract those words into ideas. Berry kept pushing them back into the ground.
Who is your neighbor?
Where does your water come from?
What happens to the soil after you are gone?
What does your way of life require of someone, or somewhere, you cannot see?
Those questions have followed me from that Wofford classroom into nearly everything I have done since.
I never met Wendell Berry. I always hoped I might. I got to meet Willie Nelson, a few Presidents, and Seamus Heaney. But I will always regret not getting to have a quick chat with Berry.
Instead I read him (a lot). I listen to him and watch copious amounts of old interviews on YouTube. I return to the poems, and I find myself writing my own poetry that sounds too much like him. I argue with him often. I try, probably unsuccessfully, to imitate some of the patience of his prose and some of the stubborn particularity of his vision. I think we both shared the blessing and the curse of the cup of righteous indignation (thanks to Larry T. McGehee at Wofford who admonished me for my own).
And somewhere along the way, without entirely realizing it, his questions became some of my questions.
So today I am simply grateful.
Grateful for a poem encountered at the right time in my stubborn life.
Grateful for a writer who refused to allow land to become scenery in his stubborn life.
Grateful for someone who insisted that a human life is not made larger by escaping limits but can become deeper by accepting the responsibilities of belonging.
And grateful for the reminder that place is not merely the backdrop against which our lives occur.
Place participates in making us who we are.
To lose that relationship is therefore more than an environmental problem. It is a crisis of perception. We become less able to recognize what kind of creatures we are: dependent, embodied, located, receiving our lives every moment from worlds we did not make.
Perhaps that is why Berry’s work struck me so deeply all those years ago, even before I understood what it was doing to me. It was teaching me to come home. Always coming home, to pull from Ursula Le Guin.
There is grief today. But there is also work to do.
Pay attention to the creek.
Learn the trees.
Know where the water goes after it leaves your yard.
Grow something.
Stay somewhere long enough to love it.
Make a few unnecessary tracks.
Maybe even some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
