Happy St. Brigid’s Day! As we arc towards the springtime, current temperatures be darned, I’ve confirmed plans to spend more time outdoors this year. 

This intention, plus the headlines on any given day, have me returning yet again to the Wendell Berry poem below. I cannot count the number of times I have taken shelter in the image of “the day-blind stars waiting with their light.”

Accompanying this grace of the world, and sometimes even more important to me, is the wonder that can so easily be accessed through our earthly places and fellow beings. Monarchs fly 3000 miles on those paper-thin wings during their migrations, with precision that would make any GPS system spark green with envy. Honeybees, paper wasps, and squishy sea creatures all craft homes from proteins made by their own bodies, while illuminating the most beautiful math in the universe. Mangroves turn salt water into fresh. Narwhals exist.

Dear ones, right this minute, things may seem cold and dark, both literally and metaphorically.

And yet.

The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry 

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.

A collection of Berry’s writing that includes this poem can be found here, and a terrific OnBeing conversation with Krista Tippett and Ellen Davis, featuring Berry’s poetry, can be found here.