“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.”
— Wendell Berry
Someone posted this on Facebook the other day and if I had ever read it before I had forgotten it. I love Wendell Berry and I love this image of “still water.”
I’ve always returned to the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers near where I grew up in Kentucky to re-center myself. When I read this, it occurred to me how that is the opposite of still water.
Poets have such an amazing grasp of the language. I’ve become convinced only poets can offer these turns of phrase that stay with us.
I think maybe I need to find more still water in my life..
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