On the days I am lucky...I am silent

(My musings are below the poem)

VII

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

"VII" from the poem "1994" by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997.

It just may be that there is no poet who speaks so deeply to me so often as does Wendell Berry. But then, there is so much poetry that I have not read...perhaps there will be others I will discover who so often seem to speak what is in the very depths of me.... I can open a book of Berry's poems and within minutes I feel like I have been directly spoken to, and that Berry has said what was most deeply in my heart but I could never have articulated so powerfully and clearly. When I read Wendell Berry's poetry I feel like I have been completely understood...though Mr. Berry knows not a thing about my existence, of course.

There is the quotation that I use in my Blogger profile. It sits--at the time of this posting, at least--at the very top of my sidebar:

"I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will." --Wendell Berry, from II, Sabbaths 1999.

And there are so many others: How to be a poet (to remind myself), and The Peace of Wild Things, just to mention a couple.... Each of these speaks to me of what is most deeply in my heart....

I remember reading once about Mr. Berry's "philosophy of writing" (and damned if I can remember what publication it was in or if I can locate it online at the moment), if you could call it that, which he didn't. It was just a small part in an article.... Berry's approach to writing, as I remember it, is quite "no-nonsense." (Rather like Spencer Tracy's "philosophy of acting" which was "Just learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture"--but I digress....) Berry does not write because he feels compelled to write, as some writers apparently do. He does not seem to view his writing as a "vocation." And he has little patience for writers who he says "agonize" over their writing and talk about it like it's such hard work. If it's such torture, says Berry, then they should give it up, don't write another word. Berry's writing comes out of the life he lives and how he lives it, and it would seem that he would be just as content if he did not write. Berry doesn't even consider himself a writer first, but a farmer. His idea is that the writer needs to be able to not write just as much as he/she needs to be able to write, and until the writer can, he/she shouldn't write. He thinks people should work first of all on living authentic, holistic lives in community, on being, and doing the things to make a life. Writing should be secondary. Live then write. If you don't live then shut up. The world will be better for it, either way. I would say it's not a take you would expect from a famous writer.

I love Berry's straightforwardness and simplicity. No dissembling, no apologies, he just is. No wonder his writing touches something in me that I want to live more authentically.... In the end the writing is not the point...the life is.

When I finally embraced that it was a great relief to me. Because I have always been somewhat gifted with words (Notice I say somewhat, the "gifting" is a relative thing) and because it is one of the few skills I possess, for some time I felt compelled to become a writer. And by that I mean someone who could "make a living" writing. But I found it a heavy burden, and the "compelling" robbed it of joy for me.... It has been some time ago now that I opted to really pursue just one thing: trying to live an authentic life from and to the few things that stir my heart most deeply. If one's life is not authentically being lived from what one might call one's "core," then the writing will not be authentic either. I am not interested in just churning out words for the sake of it. There are a lot of those in the world. If the words come, I will be pleased. If they don't, I am not phased. I hope to still be living "what my heart beats loudly for, and what feels heavy in my gut,"

Mr. Berry says in the poem above that "on the days I am lucky...I am silent." Somehow I feel like I know what he means by that. While I deeply cherish my friends (and those who are my deepest friends know my passion and my loyalty and that I would go to hell and back for them), and while I can find some commonality and empathy (and conversation) in my heart for almost any person I meet--such that sometimes people mistake me for a "people person"--...I still feel that "on the days I am lucky...I am silent...."

For me that is my most authentic life. It is from that place words must come, or they mean nothing really.

And I will be quiet now. :)

With thoughts of love and peace to all today....