RIP Wendell Berry

[Joseph Zarr]

An American Agrarian icon has passed. He is a poet laureate for the Do Good Farmer and agrarians among us. Wendell Berry completely transformed me as a young man. His words changed my thinking and my approach to farm life. I was a young buck in my 20's living alone on a 600 acre remnant Savannah cattle ranch in Clear Lake, Minnesota (about 20 minutes East of St. Cloud). I daily walked the lands and harvested young oaks to be felled and draw knifed to make fence posts to repair the miles of barbed wire fencing. I often camped among the Hereford cattle in a tent with my horse hitched after long days where I was too tired to make it back to my barn loft apartment. To be young again and transforming. It was there I memorized this passage from his poem 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."

This poem essentially lives in my bones. I lost a Hero today. RIP, Wendell. Your words will live on.