“When despair for the world grows in me…”
Share your Thoughts
Posted on June 3, 2007
Filed Under Deep ecology, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Today the remnants of tropical depression Barry cross over, bathing us in a cool tropical rain, much needed. 
Our Spring world was beginning to turn brown from lack of rain in May. The Earth is heaving great sighs of relief and pleasure. I can feel them.
And that inspired me to look for a poem to share with you this weekend, one that might speak to something I struggle with every day — ecological hope. Despite this human knowing, fearing, and grieving the future, Nature remains vividly within itself, in the moment, and still it gives such joy.
If we would return to it, see it, lie in its grasses, walk under its trees, smell the cool rain as it falls on a dry hardened soil, feel it soften under our feet as it receives the rain, we just might find it within ourselves to alter our lives as quickly as is necessary to keep this joy part of the fabric of our lives.
And so this poem from Wendell Berry:
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.
Today I wish us this freedom…
Technorati Tags: Wendell Berry, love Nature
Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.
Source: Collected Poems, 1957-1982 (1985).
Photos: http://www.freenaturepictures.com/
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