Tuesday, October 18, 2011

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

2 comments:

Lisa Borgnes Giramonti said...

Did you have a lovely weekend with your English boys?? Your description of them was so beautiful. They are as lucky to know you as you are to know them! Long live long friendships. xxx

kairu said...

I came across something written by Buck Henry, and thought of you. It's in the introduction he wrote for the 2010 edition of Brooke Hayward's memoir (Haywire); he'd always been a little (or a lot) in love with her. On the eve of Dennis Hopper's funeral he looked across the room and saw Dennis and Brooke's daughter, Marin, and in her, echoes of her lovely mother.

This is what he said: "The pleasures of the past live on, mixed in all of us. So do the pains. But we can outrun them if we try."