The Peace of the Wild Things

April is National Poetry Month, so I decided to go through poems I saved and write about a few. I ended up settling on Wendell Berry’s “Peace of the Wild Things” because it really is one of my favorites and also feels like Spring, the season in which we are now, definitively, situated. (Don’t believe it? Look at all the road work, the true harbinger of Spring.)
Berry’s poem is short, so I’ll share it in full —
“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 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 the 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 life. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
If I can have a moment to be nerdy, every time I use ‘/’ in the above, I am denoting where a line break would be traditionally, which is also where you would ordinarily pause for breath if you read the poem out loud. What makes this poem work, for me, is that it captures the essence of what it means to be totally and fully present in a moment by forcing a break — and therefore a breath — between ‘For a time’ and ‘I rest in the grace of the world, and am free,’ which is a full and complete thought. But broken across those two lines, there comes an invisible world in the middle of that sentence, a refuge in which the speaker (and reader) may exist outside of time, where they are allowed to pause for however long they want and find presence and therefore, the tranquility Berry’s speaker craves.
In Eastern traditions, there is a practice called mindfulness, a philosophy that boils down to this: we only have this moment in which we are now. When I was younger, I struggled heavily with anxiety. My mind would run so far ahead, conjuring up all kinds of terrible ‘What if’s’ and other scenarios that I’d be left paralyzed, concerned for myself and everyone around me and dying to control my world. The idea of an active moment (i.e. now) as described in mindfulness practices is one of the first ways I found to ground myself into the present, to stop the thoughts. It wasn’t an active meditation, just redirecting myself away from the infinite loop, as I call it, my doom spiral. I’d stop, take a breath, and remind myself, ‘You’re here.’
The second was a kind of homecoming and echoes Berry’s sentiments a little more directly. While living in the city, I took up hiking most weekends as a way to stay healthy, but also because getting out of town, I felt so much happier and clearer on everything. I’d never noticed it before because nature was always abundant in my childhood, but then it became clear and it became important, and it’s something else I’m reminded of whenever I read this poem. Nature quiets us. We’re a part of the natural world and benefit from exposure to it.
I recently lost my dog. He was young, but fell ill and there was nothing to be done except offer him the kindness of a quick and easy death through our vet. He shepherded me through multiple moves, across the country, and through a global pandemic, and to lose him before I was ready was like being cleaved in two. I left the vet’s feeling a hollowness in my body that I can only liken to a bird’s bone.
I went up to the mountains a few days after and wandered alone. I thought about him and how much he would have loved the trail, and ended up sitting down by the river on a rock. I cried, surprised myself and made myself laugh for crying since I’d already done so much of it, then sat and stared at the water. Slowly, I came back to myself and slowly, I allowed myself to to feel all of it. And so to read Berry’s poem again with fresh eyes, I’m reminded of the potent power of a great poem and how it can change your life.