The Peace of Wild Things

A path diverging from the familiar....

Everything Old Is New Again

At President Joe Biden’s inauguration, the young poet, Amanda Gorman, speaking to “Americans, and The World,” expressed poetically how humans strive and thrive with passion and compassion (to borrow a phrase from another of my favourite poets, Maya Angelou):

   Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:

   That even as we grieved, we grew,

   That even as we hurt, we hoped,

   That even as we tired, we tried.

I have to hope that the post-Covid world (when the disease is endemic rather than ripping across the globe without fear nor favour) will be a better world, where we can see things freshly and anew. Despite trudging many local byways over the years that I have lived in Saltaire, occasionally a new route presents itself and, on a familiar trail around the Bolton Abbey estate recently, we followed a signpost to Coney Warren and trod a path that was new to us.

Intrepid Exploration

Posforth Gill and Posforth Force

Negotating steep slopes, stiles, heathery fields, and walls by woods, it was reasonably easy to reach the Valley of Desolation where two falls, slightly tucked away but worth the find, thunder over drops. The higher falls, reached by a cul-de-sac path, is at Posforth Gill and the lower falls, the longer drops, are named Posforth Force. A perfect place for a picnic.

Reflecting back, projecting forward

Nature by day, TV by night! It’s notable that our TV-watching during this second or third Covid-lockdown (depending on whether you count local lockdowns) has mixed stressful police or medical dramas (Line of Duty, Unforgotten, ER) with gentler fare (Schitt’s Creek, Greyson’s Art Club, The Great Pottery Throw Down). It’s almost as if we need the distress to stay alert to issues and problems outside the pandemic and the beneficial stress (the eustress) to help us sleep. Whatever gets you through the night. I’ve found the poem The Peace of Wild Things a useful go-to poem during the last year. It was written by Wendell Berry (born 1934), a poet-philospher, essayist and novelist who is also a farmer and environmental activist.

Whatever Gets You Through The Night

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

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.

It is interesting that this poem was included in a collection, Tools of the trade: Poems for new doctors, given to all graduating doctors in Scotland between 2014 and 2018. By doing so, the medical organisations were acknowledging that poetry (or lyrics in general or more broadly the Arts) can play a vital role in contributing to the well being of all (both patients and health practitioners.) I have always believed this to be self-evident which is why the Tory party’s suggestion that ballerinas (and by implication all arts workers) should retrain to work in IT (Fatima’s next job could be in cyber – she just doesn’t know it yet) was so unenlightened and counter to the true “wealth of the nation” - the peace of wild things and the people who grew, hoped and tried.