Fall/Winter 2007
Finding
A Place On The Earth
By Mark Powell
If the idea of personal
satisfaction means that one has found life-fulfillment,
then it would seem that very few these days have found
satisfaction.
The constant movement toward the next thing, the next
purchase, the next experience, would, by appearances
anyway, make an outside observer think that the richest
nation on earth is also the most deeply unhappy, meaning
that gratification and pleasure may be as elusive to us as
some nearly vanished bird – something one hopes to see, but
not really with much optimism.
I bring this up because of late I have been reading Wendell
Berry.
Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1934 in Henry County
Kentucky, and is a teacher, a man of letters -- writing
novels, short stories poems and essays -- and he is an
economic and cultural critic. He is also a farmer.
I do not remember how I was introduced to him, but it was
probably his poetry. I do remember reading his
novel, A Place On The
Earth, and being powerfully
effected. The prose was slow and methodical as a horse
plow, and the harvest was a story that still stays with me.
But, by far, I have been most touched by his essays. Berry
believes that we must somehow reconnect with the dirt, and
“until we understand what the land is…and re-enter the
woods…only then can we encounter silence and darkness…and a
sense of the world’s longevity,…its ability to thrive
without [us], of [our] inferiority to it and [our]
dependence on it.
To live this way, then, means we must all become farmers?
Hardly.
But, Berry does assert that we must all serve the earth.
This means we must envision a future that differs
significantly from the urban-industrial-information times
currently rending the planet. And, he insists that this new
relationship with the earth must begin right now, right
where we are.
Norman Wizba, in his introduction to Berry’s agrarian
essays: The Art Of The Common
Place, says that Berry believes
that, “the path toward wholeness depends on our discovery
and acknowledgment of, and the response to, a greater
goodness that contextualizes us.” He goes on to say that,
“our fundamental mistake is that we have presumed to be the
authors of ourselves and our destinies, and thus have
forgotten or denied that we are part of ‘a great
coauthorship in which we are all collaborating with God and
with nature in the making of ourselves and one another.’”
Thus, if we insist on living like captains of our own
providence, with an especially harsh disregard for the dirt
under our feet, it will lead to great loss in our
heart-wholeness.
So, what would happen if we were to “re-enter the woods?”
Berry tells us: “Perhaps then, having heard that silence
and seen that darkness, [we] will grow humble before the
place and begin to take it in – to learn
from
it what it is…[Our] life will
grow out of the ground like other lives of the place, and
take its place among them…”
And maybe then, what we “value most in the world: the life
and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human
communities and households,” will find satisfaction growing
in us.