"I go among trees and sit still"

I am currently reading "A Timbered Choir," a collection of poetry by Wendell Berry. These are the "Sabbath Poems," written over two decades on Berry's weekly Sunday walks through nature. He writes in his preface: "These poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors...I hope that some readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort." In this area, as in so many others, I'm trying to do as the poet-novelist-essayist-activist- farmer from Port Royal, Kentucky advises. I've copied out a couple of the poems into a notebook that I carry in my back pocket. Here's a Sabbath Poem I intend to memorize, along with the epigraph from Isaiah inscribed at the beginning of this excellent book:

"The whole earth is at rest, and is
quiet: they break forth into singing."
                                    ISAIAH 14:7

1979 (I)

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

Here is an excellent interview with Wendell Berry in the Fall 2007 issue of Shenandoah (via Poetry Daily).

[William] Blake said that the arts are our way of conversing with paradise, and that's probably as good a generalization as could be made. There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity. And, of course, that's one of the possibilities contemplated in the biblical idea of the Sabbath...If you take up that theme of the Sabbath you're going to take up also the theme of failure, of all the things in our life that obstruct such apprehension, and make it difficult or impossible. But maybe it's possible to have moments when you're just freely in place, apart from the clutter of what Shakespeare called the workaday world.

A second interview, in prose, from Sojourners (July 2004).

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