Words Of Hope

You can be pretty sure that if I'm blogging about how to buy food that doesn't hurt animals I'm in one of those 'everything bothers me' moods. The last two posts were about egg production and milk production, chickens and cows respectively. I also just finished the book written by Julia Butterfly Hill, about her time tree-sitting in an ancient redwood tree in order to save these thousand year old beings, who are older than the arrival of white men on this continent, from being cut down to become a deck or a picnic table. When I feel so overwhelmed with emotion about human cruelty and greed I get in a total funk.

To heal myself I reach out to nature. I sit on the deck and listen to the birds sing, feel the wind on my skin and hair, watch as the sunlight filters through the dancing leaves, and read the poetry of Wendell Berry. Here are two examples of his writing that speak to that healing.

In February of 1968 which was, of course during the Vietnam war, he wrote about war and peace:

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
War spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.



The Peace of Wild Things
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.