Discovering, and then befriending, a sense of place has become increasingly important to me: Wendell Berry has been quoted as saying, "If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." As a child of the middle class whose father worked for industry, we moved throughout the Northeast every two or three years until I reached the age of 13. Five years later, the family moved South and I went to college, never to live at "home" again. What followed included a variety of short-term jobs, a stint of following the Grateful Dead around the Northeast for part of a summer, and organizing with the farm workers in St. Louis, Kansas City and eventually Los Angeles. I attended five - count them - five undergraduate schools: Wisconsin, North Carolina, Connecticut, Missouri and California. Given the beautiful spirit of inclusivity during the 70's, all my credits transferred and I was able to graduate from San Francisco State University with a BA in political science before heading across the country to attending Union Theological Seminary. During those three years in NYC, I did internships in an upscale, suburban community, spent a summer organizing woodcutters in rural Mississippi, and finished seminary with an urban internship in Jamaica, Queens, NY. Over the next 40 years I was blessed to serve four different congregations: Michigan, Ohio, Arizona and Massachusetts and complete my doctoral work in San Anselmo, CA. I have had the privilege of visiting Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union four times, studying for a semester in Costa Rica and Montreal, Quebec and visiting Mexico, Nicaragua, Scotland and England.
The upside of all this moving around is something akin to the experiences of "Army brats." I know how to meet people (even though I am profoundly shy) and listen carefully to their stories. The downside, of course, is that most of my life has been spent uprooted and disconnected from community. Wendell Berry would call this a life informed by industrial values which he contrasts with the values of agrarian life. In a 2018 interview Berry articulated some of how he understands the tensions between these two worlds. A life shaped by agrarian values include:
1. An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land.
2. An informed and conscientious submission to nature.
3. The wish to have and to belong to a place of one’s own, as the only secure source of sustenance and independence.
4. A persuasion in favor of economic democracy; a preference for enough over too much.
5. Fear and contempt of waste of every kind, and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion.
6. A preference for saving rather than spending.
7. An assumption of the need for a subsistence or household economy.
8. An acknowledged need for neighbors, and a willingness to be a good neighbor.
9. A living sense of the need for continuity of family and community life.
10. Respect for work, and (as self-respect) for good work.
11. A lively suspicion of anything new, contradicting the ethos of consumerism and the cult of celebrity.
Contrast this with the values of an industrialized society:
We are going to have to talk about these two kinds of life and economy in order to stay on speaking terms and to have some measure of peace between them. But industrial values are exactly contrary to the agrarian values I’ve just listed. The ideal of industrialism is for people to have to purchase everything they need. In other words, the old dependence on nature and neighbors and self-employment—that basic sufficiency and self-sufficiency––are to be replaced by merchants and merchandise. We have to understand how radically these two ways of life are opposed before we can talk about the conversation that needs to occur among us, across our division.
We are going to have to talk about these two kinds of life and economy in order to stay on speaking terms and to have some measure of peace between them. But industrial values are exactly contrary to the agrarian values I’ve just listed. The ideal of industrialism is for people to have to purchase everything they need. In other words, the old dependence on nature and neighbors and self-employment—that basic sufficiency and self-sufficiency––are to be replaced by merchants and merchandise. We have to understand how radically these two ways of life are opposed before we can talk about the conversation that needs to occur among us, across our division.
Over 80% of Americans live in urban and suburban areas and many have been as mobile as myself. We have learned to be excellent consumers. We see much of life as a transaction to be negotiated and most of creation's natural resources as commodities to be used - with integrity, to be sure - so that we might continue to be comfortable. I often cut to T.S. Eliot's verse in "The Rock" at this point in my musing re: what we have lost in this transition:
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Wendell Berry's poem is slightly less lofty, but speaks to the tensions of losing touch with our sense of place:
Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
The streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
Then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
Of what it is that no other place is, and by
Your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
Place that you belong to though it is not yours,
For it was from the beginning and will be to the end
Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
Who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
And the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
Fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
In the trees in the silence of the fisherman
And the heron, and the trees that keep the land
They stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.
(see the full text @ https://www.
For almost 10 years living here in the gentle hills of the Berkshires, I did not really know - or love - this place. Of course I was smitten by the view from our back deck: it takes in a natural wetlands and a few acres of wooded hills. Save the traffic noise from the front of our house and you would think you were in a wilderness. (We'll be getting a small, circulating fountain this summer to address the noise.) I didn't really hear the birds when they returned at about this time of year. I didn't know the flowers that bloomed throughout spring and summer on our property. I barely knew our neighbors. I liked the solitude of our place, but I did not really know it as a place until I started to garden. And cut back the wild grapevines each summer. And trimmed the branches from the huge oak and maple trees before hauling them to the back to be cut up. And plant pumpkins and tomatoes that could not thrive in our too sandy and somewhat acidic soil.
It has been said that something is restored in our soul when we get our hands dirty in the earth. That has certainly been true for me. It started my quest to watch and comprehend the spirituality of each season. It helped me listen better to the returning birds and critters. It took me into a deeper desire to understand how our special needs dog, Lucie, makes sense of her frightening world. And grow in patience and love for her rather than frustration and bewilderment. (Ok, I am still bewildered but in a quiet and tender way most of the time.) Berry puts it like this:
Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
From the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
By which it speaks for itself and no other.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
And the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
Which is the light of imagination. By it you see
The likeness of people in other places to yourself
In your place. It lights invariably the need for care
Toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.
From the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
By which it speaks for itself and no other.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
And the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
Which is the light of imagination. By it you see
The likeness of people in other places to yourself
In your place. It lights invariably the need for care
Toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.
Something changed in our hearts this fall when we planted a butterfly and milkweed garden with our grandchildren: at least for me, this place become a deep part of my being. S as part of my prayer this week I have been drawing small maps of our gardens. I have been reading through books - and collecting catalogs - of native seeds and plants so that we might do our part in sharing some healing in this small place. And I have been listening for the wisdom of the "songs and sayings" of this place.
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