The Peace of Wild Things

Resting in the Grace of the World

Hello and a very happy new year to you.

On New Year’s Day, the future stretches out before us, as though we were preparing to set sail across an immense ocean toward a distant horizon. Dreams and hopes but also at times fears and forebodings, all woven together at the threshold of the unknown.

I’d like to share a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry, one that describes a moment when our attention is drawn away from the imagined future, into the living presence of the world, offering what the painter Paul Cézanne once called ‘a taste of nature’s eternity’.

It’s called ‘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.

Last night I watched a powerful and moving film, A Hidden Life, directed by Terrence Malick, in which the same peace and freedom appear under conditions of extreme hardship. It tells the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer imprisoned during the Second World War for refusing to swear allegiance to Hitler.

There is a scene in which Franz is visited by his lawyer while he is confined to his prison cell, awaiting death. The lawyer urges him to sign a document that would secure his freedom and enable him to return home to his wife and children. The offer is simple. A signature. A return to ordinary life.

Franz listens, standing behind the bars of his cell. Then he replies, very calmly,

‘I am already free.’

Meister Eckhart spoke of the same understanding: ‘a free mind is one on which nothing weighs, nothing worries, nothing concerns, a mind drawn wholly into the essence of things’.

Whatever the year ahead may bring, may this peace and freedom be with you.

With much love.

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