Wendell Berry: An Invitation Into Seeing | NanLeah
Wendell Berry: An Invitation Into Seeing
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
When I think of Wendell Berry, I find myself thinking not only about what and how he wrote, but about the way he taught me to see.
“I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”
On September 8, 2025, Berry’s way of seeing became an invitation into my own way of seeing—into the particular landscape of my life, and into a way of being in relationship with the living world.
It was after a Dance to Heal the Earth ceremony. I went outside to ground myself and found myself wondering:
What would happen if I stayed?
Usually, I would feed the birds and then go inside, careful not to disturb them.
But that morning, with Berry’s poem in my heart, I stayed.
I will probably never forget what happened next.
Something shifted. I was no longer simply observing the lives around me. I was keeping company with them. I came into the peace of wild things.
That has become the heart of Poetry of Nature.
This year, our circle has been living with Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things”, and a year later, I am still discovering what his poem asks of me.
It asks me to pay attention. To slow down enough to notice that the world around me is not scenery, but living presence.
My neighbor, a Steller’s jay I’ve named Mathilde, appears.
Mama’s fawns approach me.
Sasquatch, a squirrel I’ve befriended, takes peanuts from my hand.
Chickadees sit on my open palm.
The space between observer and observed vanishes. Language falls away. Attention becomes relationship. Relationship becomes belonging.
The longer I practice this kind of attention, the more the perceived boundary between myself and the more-than-human world softens.
Berry opened that door for me. His gift, despite the despair and grief in our world, was an invitation to look deeply enough that I might discover how I might find the peace of wild things—and then to invite others to look with me.
That is what Poetry of Nature has become.
We gather not simply to write poems about Nature, but to practice a different kind of attention—to listen, to notice, and to allow ourselves to keep company with life and peace.
Sometimes, through poetry, we discover that the world we thought we were writing about is also writing itself into us.
That is Berry’s gift continuing to move through the world.
Not as doctrine.
As invitation.
Look.
Listen.
Stay awhile.
Keep company with life.
I am deeply grateful to have lived in the time of Wendell Berry—for his poems, for his life, and for the integrity with which he kept turning our attention toward the living world.
But most of all, I am grateful that his way of seeing helped me discover my own—and that it continues to invite others into theirs.
Come.
Look with me.
There is more here than we knew.
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