Practicing Resurrection

Wendell Berry died this past Monday in the Kentucky farmhouse where he spent most of his ninety-two years learning what one acre could teach a man willing to stay. I heard the news sideways, mid-afternoon, in the middle of something else, the way the news that matters most tends to arrive.

What I felt was the accumulating weight of a year that has already asked this much of me once, since Dolly, since Yayoi, since Tim. Now Gloria. Death has been relentless this year. It does not wait its turn.

I go to the pond daily, the way I always have, and only now, after Monday, do the memories of the past week read as more than themselves. One evening the moon stood over the water like a searchlight, sweeping nothing, finding nothing, just holding its beam down into the dark as if watching for something none of us could see yet. Another evening the egrets had gathered into the trees by the dozen, so many and so still the whole shoreline looked feathered, gathered, it seems now, to worry, and to pray. And in the channel toward the footbridge, two swans moved through the closing green together, heads bent close, gossiping, the way you gossip about a worry you haven't yet found the words for. I did not know, at the time, that I was watching messengers. Not about what had already happened. About what was coming — about our heroes, and about who follows them, and about us.

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.

Berry wrote that decades before I ever stood at this water. He knew the despair first, named it plainly, and then went and lay down anyway where a duck was resting and a heron was feeding, and found, apparently, that the world would hold him without his help.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

I did not invent the phrase I keep repeating this week. I am only doing what he told a generation of us to do: make more tracks than necessary, some of them the wrong direction, and trust the ground to receive whatever we lay down on it.

I have no tidy way to close this. Berry has died, and Dolly has died, and Yayoi has died, and Tim has died, and now Gloria has died, and none of that grief resolves into wisdom because I happen to be on a deadline to find meaning in things.

I'll admit that somewhere in the middle of this week I started, half seriously, drawing up a list of who's left to protect. Someone needs to wrap Robin Wall Kimmerer in bubble wrap. Put Robert Macfarlane in a safe somewhere out of harm's reach. Tell Merlin Sheldrake to switch diets. We are running short on people who taught us how to look at the world.

I keep asking a question I don't have the standing to answer: who takes up the work now? Berry spent sixty years teaching people to pay obsessive attention to one acre. That is not the kind of post that gets filled by appointment. It either gets taken up, quietly, by people nobody is watching yet, or it doesn't get taken up at all. Somewhere, maybe, someone is already doing it, in a place as unglamorous as this pond, and none of us has any way of knowing that yet. That not-knowing is not nothing, but it is not comfort, either.

The pond, it turns out, was not keeping its own counsel while I stood there grieving. It was keeping watch, the way it had been all along, before I had a name for what was coming.

And still the world goes on.

Taking into itself all of our fears, our failures, our frustration, and delivering resurrection. Because that has always been its nature, since before Berry, since before any of us were here to notice.

A Prayer

God of the ground that receives what we cannot keep and gives back what we did not expect: thank you for a teacher who spent ninety-two years learning one place well enough to tell the rest of us the truth of it. As losses stack this year, one name deep on top of another, we do not know who comes next, or whether anyone does. Hold us in that not-knowing the way soil holds a seed it has not yet explained. Teach us to lie down in the world without fear, trusting that burial, in your hands, has never been the last word. Through Christ, in whom every promise Berry ever pointed toward has already been kept — buried, and risen. Amen.