Minister’s Message
American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer Wendell Berry (1934- ) published this poem in New Collected Poems (2012):
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.”
Since 2014, the poem has been included in an anthology given to all doctors and dentists graduating in Scotland. Perhaps we can think of the poem as a sort of updated Hippocratic Oath—not only “do no harm” but actively seek peace in the natural world beyond human emotion and ways of thinking. That is some powerful medicine, I think. And as the seasons change, I encourage your to be a good doctor to yourself, to give yourself good medicine. Lay down in the grass, seek the sun on your face, breathe in the scent of falling leaves and dying weeds. Sit in your window, in your doorway, on your porch or in your yard, at the park—and let the breezes tease the tiny hairs on your skin. Rest. Be at one with yourself. Be at one with the world beyond the human, for that is your world, too. We are a conscious part of that world, and it holds healing and solace for our worries and our aching pain. Perhaps this choral version of the poem is just what you need to hear today
I pray that a pause and a rest will help you return to yourself and know that you are held in a web, in a fabric deeper, wider, longer, older, more spacious and expansive than anything human minds can conceive as you remember, today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.
Blessings, Rev. Rita