I cried when I learned Wendell Berry died. A couple times, actually, and I’m probably not done. The man meant a lot to me.
Have you ever read a book that met you at exactly the right place in your life? Jayber Crow did that for me. I had read an excerpt from the novel for one of my final college courses. I don’t remember the name of the course, but it had to do with living a meaningful life or something (#Christian liberal arts education).
The excerpt stirred something in me, such that I remembered the title and went looking for the book a few months after graduation.
Kristen Drumgoole
Jayber Crow explores themes of family, place and commitment. Of rootedness and dedication to imperfect places and people, and of letting those places and people shape the person you are becoming. In a season of life that included college graduation, moving back home, a low-paying job and a church community that I felt reluctant to return to, Jayber Crow, in some measure, showed me the way.
Since that time, I’ve read a handful of the Port William novels (of which Jayber Crow is one), and have explored his essays and poetry. As of now, there is still plenty of Wendell Berry I haven’t read, and I’m glad. More to explore and look forward to.
But Wendell, as an author and a person, has served as an anchor for me. I have returned to The Peace of Wild Things again and again when the world has felt dark. I memorized The Broken Ground over a decade ago, in a season of faith deconstruction and new beginnings.
The poem, ostensibly, describes new plant life — the ever-changing nature of a fruit that starts from seed, and the parts that break and change and fall away in order to bring forth the new, beautiful thing. I thought it was a metaphor for the ways I was changing and the new person I was becoming, but the truth is I have become a new person a million times since then. The words are ever green.
“Plant something! Cultivate a relationship with the earth under your feet. Learn what it means to nurture something into bearing fruit.”
Last spring, I watched a documentary about Wendell Berry’s life. In addition to being a writer, he also was a Kentucky farmer. Over the course of his life, he watched the ways industrialization and government intervention in farming changed the shape of rural America, and not for the better. He criticized the ways farming, out of necessity, became about optimizing profit rather than about care for the land in order that it might care for us.
My takeaway from the documentary, as well as much of his writing, was this: Plant something! Cultivate a relationship with the earth under your feet. Learn what it means to nurture something into bearing fruit.
I think he would argue this act of tending a plot of earth is good for the land but also for the one who tends it. Developing a relationship with a little piece of earth changes a person into someone who is more connected, more grounded, more attuned to what the earth is doing and what they ought to do in response.
After watching that documentary, I planted a garden. Because of Wendell. Since June, I have spent a few moments of almost every day tending two tiny garden beds. My children often are out there with me, pulling weeds (and sometimes plants, oops), watering and enthusiastically picking snap peas (I think we grew a whole 12 of them), lettuce (two whole heads!) and tomatoes (our only bumper crop this season). A few weeks ago, we added soil, worked our compost into it, and planted some lettuce, kale and carrots. We have a bunch of little seedlings now, and we delight in the way they get a little bigger each day.
Do we know what we’re doing? Not really. But we have found joy in the trial and error of being new and not that great at something, and yet in spite of us the ground has offered its gifts.
I’m under no illusion that I live a life Wendell Berry would be super proud of. I spend too much time on Instagram, and a lot of my work is behind a computer screen. I order stuff on Amazon (I’m trying to quit). But I do aim to honor his admonition to “practice resurrection,” by tending a garden. By knowing and loving my neighbors. By doing what I can to see and address human needs and alleviate suffering. By being a friend.
So thanks, Wendell, for offering us a lens through which to see the world. For challenging us to tend our own little gardens. For your words, your legacy. I always was comforted by the fact that you were still out there in the world, writing your words and doing good, quiet work. I’m sad to know you’re gone. But I’ll keep tending my garden and my life, and in doing so, practicing resurrection.
Kristen Drumgoole is a child and family therapist, mom to two wild and wonderful little humans, and coffee enthusiast. She appreciates her live-in barista (ok, husband) Emmitt, and tends her little garden in Silver Spring, Md.