Wendell Berry

"I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will."

-Wendell Berry, from II, Sabbaths 1999, in "Given"


Some of his most awesome books:
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
The Mad Farmer Poems
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

May my heart always be open

May my heart always be open
by e.e. cummings

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile.

~ ee cummings, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

From a book about Irish monasticism, some Celtic nature poetry:

I have a bothy in the wood--
none knows it save the Lord, my God;
one wall an ash, the other hazel,
and a great fern makes the door.

The doorposts are made of heather,
the lintel of honeysuckle;
and wild forest all around
yields mast for well-fed swine.

This size my hut: the smallest thing,
homestead amid well-trod paths;
a woman (but blackbird clothed and seeming)
warbles sweetly from its gable.

This little sweet humble place
holds tenure of the teeming woods;
maybe you will come to see?--
but alone I like quite happy.

Original Face:
Flowers in spring
Cuckoos in summer
Moon in autumn
Snow in winter
serene and cool

- Zen Master Dogen, 1247, translated by Sensei Kazuaki Tanahashi

"As a poet, I hold the most ancient values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."

-Gary Snyder, A Controversy of Pets

"The man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded. I say this even as wilderness and our indifference, Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form."

--Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems