The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

This has been a day of many poems to live even though I feel I have done almost nothing except sit and stare. Well, maybe not exactly nothing because:

1. I did talk to my sister-in-law in Britain. Something I do every week and we remembered my late husband and Tommy Makem, whom my sister-in-law had met once long ago.

2. I did sort out travel arrangements with a friend to go to a celebration of life out of the city tomorrow.

3. I am writing my second post of the day as I live a poem or several poems today.

4. I did do the two crossword puzzles in the paper this morning. Not exactly work but better than FB.

5. I did add about 20 folk songs to my phone for my next walk. Adding songs always takes me at least two hours. But I did learn how to do an airdrop to my phone. All was not lost.

Maybe it wasn’t a completely wasted day. Maybe it was my version of disappearing, except it wasn’t into nature. It was into the worn cracks in the couch where small crumbs spawn. They are there because I didn’t haul out the vacuum cleaner this week. Well, I needed peace.

Great heron and wood drake aren’t as near at hand as dust bunnies and fungus gnats, but I have made peace with them over the years, as I have with the crumbs and the indelible spots on the sofa.

Maybe my peace with wild things is only when I walk. When I’m at home I make my peace with domestic things, the restless crumbs and the dust-blind mop.

Now I will wait for the stars and the freshness of a new day.