“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, A Poetry Film by Charlotte Ager & Katy Wang
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- Опубликовано: 27 авг 2024
- “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry is part of our “Poetry Films” series, which features animated interpretations of beloved poems from our archive. Check out the full series here: • Poetry Films .
We know poetry to be a critical pillar of public life. It rises up when official language fails us. And it gives voice to what is human and what is true, how we connect and what questions we hold.
Poetry has moved to the heart of what we offer on the radio and in podcasts, which is why we’re excited to have partnered with talented illustrators, animators, and directors to reimagine poetry in visual, dynamic ways.
This poem was originally read in the On Being episode with Ellen Davis and Wendell Berry, “The Art of Being Creatures”: onbeing.org/pr...
You can listen to and read the poem here: onbeing.org/po...
Illustration by Charlotte Ager (www.charlottea...)
Directed by Katy Wang (www.katywang.c...)
Sound and Music by David Kamp (www.studiokamp...)
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I wish I could still live this. Instead, I got an EnviroSci degree and now live Aldo Leopold's warning: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
I love the wild, but it's a battle to feel the peace in it.
Thanks for sharing this thought and quote. I am extremely moved
And Edward Abbey wrote:
"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
― Edward Abbey
And Aldo Leopold also wrote:
"We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”
― Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold
Keep fighting the good fight and striving with your knowledge and degree...then bathe in nature during your respites...
@@jefftolhurst9876 Love your post. In other words... "right here right now." Thank you.
Thank you. I feel you!
This is my favorite poem. I feel thankful for it. It makes me so emotional whenever I revisit it. And each time the feelings change a little. Hopefully I'll be able to come into the peace of wild things and stay in it just a little longer until nothing else is an option for me, until everything is peaceful and wild.
Yes. I do tax my mind with forethought of what my children and grandchildren lives may be. On a walk with my wife and our dog this morning we say morning glories, reeds in seed, and a great blue heron. For a while our minds were free as so beautifully said by Mr Berry. Such a great poem. I often revisit it when I get too lost In worry.
There’s something so genuine about the art style. Very raw and sincere.
"In wildness is the preservation of the world." Henry David Thoreau
I have only just discovered this poem. The video perfectly captures the essence of how in a troubled world there is, if you look for it fleeting moments of peace and beauty.
One of my favorite poems. A wonderful vocalization of the peace and sureness that is apparent in all things wild.
In view of the new terror over the weekend, this is a welcome solace. I feel more of this is needed.
Dam… I don’t think I’ve ever heard something as powerful and that so uniquely fits me, my life, and how I cope! This will stay with me for life and be read and listened to quite often!
I've loved this poem for many years. Thanks for adding the creative video!
This poem is so reassuring & so vital, especially lately.
So beautiful... 🕊
Rest in the grace of the world"
This is my most favourite poem! Thank you so much for this wonderful video, along with the words, the visual art takes me to the world of Wendell Berry 😭❤️
This was sent to me by an education mentor I admire. This was so moving, and I appreciate the message. Powerful!
I spend many hours "taxing my life with forethought of what my children" and grandchildren's " lives may be," as we hurtle toward climate change and the destruction of life. I lived in Costa Rica, the country with the greatest percentage of conserved land teeming with wildlife, and recently moved to NH surrounded by old forest, my view of forest out of each window; in over a week, I have had one bird in my yard, few bugs. No birds have landed on my bird feeder. As I walk my dog in silent woods, it is hard to come into " the peace of wild things." So I rest in the peace of my dog and her joy.
I love Wendell Berry. Deeply needed today with the tragedy in the Ukraine. Thank you, Julia
I keep coming back to this video...poem is beautiful and the visualization blends it in perfectly💙
I love hearing and reading this before bedtime...
What a visionary Mr Berry is …
Gorgeous. Thank you for sharing.
A favorite poem. Apropos for what most of us need to feel right now. Thank you.
Beautiful. Wendell Berry is such a treasure and this animation is a perfect collaboration with his words.
Sometimes I can only utter... wow!
Beautiful poem. Wonderful animation. Thank you.
comforting and excruciating
Wow. Amazing poem and loved the illustrations!
Beautiful, apt, perfectly aligned in word and image. Thank you.
I love this! It transports me to a different place.
So beautiful! Thank you!
love.
Very relaxing and reassuring.😌
i love hearing his accent
Beautiful!
I love this so much!
incredible
Perfect
Beautiful 🕊️✌️
Lovely
Beautiful
Fullfilling
Coming here after watching an episode of "Emergency Room (ER)" where old Dr. Lawrence declamated this poem. Who else?
I remember being this.
Well, I wonder if he has ever watched a coyote devour hare while it's alive and screaming? I love Berry, but this is pure sentimentality.
There is an existential ease of fearlessness regarding one's end. We are all worms' meat in the end.
@@johnmarkhunter yes, and one does not negate the beauty and power of the other.
Yes. Sentimentality may be the right word. And yet...is it to be dismissed for that reason? Have no idea.
Nature can be cruel in the daily fight for survival, but it teaches us all that there is beauty, calm and refuge in existence.
I have been privileged to watch a coyote grab a rabbit out from under my deck in the time before I had enclosed the gap, to witness a fox trot up to the pole where a birdfeeder hangs and quickly scoop up and flip a chipmunk into its mouth and swallow it whole, to notice the sudden shadow of a hawk zooming overhead and look on in stunned silence as it turned mid-flight to snatch a goldfinch off the perch of that same birdfeeder, to see a crow pluck a baby rabbit out of a shallow burrow at the base of a chimney and fly off to its own nest with it while it screamed, to observe an hour’s long effort of a hardworking fox to chew a rabbit in half and then dig a deep hole and bury half where it stood and carry the other half across my street to bury it on a neighbor’s land. Several times a month, an often drawn out episode of screaming will awaken me when the owls find sustenance by moonlight. Opinions may vary, but to me, these things are as representative of the grace of the world as a sunset.
Wonderful conversation, and yet I find myself frustrated. The amount of times, spiritual or spirituality was brought up in this conversation is annoying. Why is it that we have to be spiritual? Why can’t we just be human? Why is that not enough? I feel Spirituality is the new Jesus. If you were to put Jesus into this conversation every time you mentioned spirituality I think you might realize my frustration. I am a human. I am not a spiritual being stuck in a human body. Why cant I go into a shop and buy a tomato and be happy that I’m involved with other humans and participating in their nurturing and my own. Why is that a spiritual act, and not a human act. The new forms of giving power to outside entities has become normalized. I do appreciate everything that this conversation has brought. It’s misleading to say spirituality will create a better world. Human beings with all of their faults may or may not create a better world. That’s the truth and possibly frightening.
This is an interesting point you bring up and a valid annoyance in a world that’s full of so many different people and different vantage points. The world would be boring with a bunch of spiritualists all agreeing with each other. The friction of billions of lives bouncing off each other, each human engrossed in their own personal life movie, attempting to simply survive is the name of the game for some. Others just attempting a life of peace amidst the chaos of everyone else’s friction and power grabs or fighting over beliefs, while some may only have the luxury of deciding who eats the last piece of bread, too concerned with biological sustenance.
The world often feels like it’s the wild wilderness of peace and immediacy that is overlayed with all of our internal stories.
This poem seems to reflect on the awareness that beyond all the stories we are all wrapped up in from day to day (including the concepts of spirituality vs human vs nature vs nurture vs religion vs biology vs evolution, etc.) To me the act of being “spiritual” has nothing to do with beliefs or religion or dogma or shoulds vs shouldn’t. To me, being spiritual IS simply paying attention to the space inside me that can focus on the stories of my life or can focus on the wordless peace of nature or can ponder on a million whys, or can just be.
To buy a tomato amongst other humans, just going about your human day can just be a human thing or it can be a “spiritual” experience to another as they consider the miracle of how the sunlight and the earth and a human worked together to foster this tomato into your hands. But where did the tomato come from to begin with? Why a tomato at all? Why does anything exist at all and certainly why am I compelled to spend my time responding to a question that was obviously rhetorical and aimed at no one?
I can only posit that love is the force that created the tomatoes and the sun and human and the awareness that the human has of their experience. Without awareness of all this, without the friction, without the ability to focus on peace, without the yin and yang we experience here- there would be no game. And to me, the game is to have a human experience as you said. You can have yours how you choose to see it and name it, and I can have mine. And somewhere along the lines our experience overlaps, even in a small RUclips comment thread her we are- just having a human experience.
Perhaps there is more under the surface that choose to filter out until we crave something more out of the experience. Energy cannot be created or destroyed- only changed. And I’m grateful I’m always changing throughout this human experience. Be well my friend.
I’m with you
Spirituality is a human need, like water, nutrition, love, and intimacy. If spirituality isn’t in the mix, then it’s going to be hard to attain any meaningful traction on, well, anything.
Spirituality is a running theme of On Being, and of Wendell Berry’s work and life, so it is only fair and expected that it would be a major component of a conversation with him in this podcast.
Free & unafraid I am