Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Little contentments

 I was thinking about the cloud of yellow butterflies flying over the Yellow River. We were on a bluff, and the swallowtails were circling below us, and the river was running below them.

I can describe the scene, but I have trouble describing the feeling: a wonder at the world and also a satisfaction in being in it. The poet Wendell Berry got closer to that feeling than I can when he wrote about not wanting the great things …

 

but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman's silence
receiving the river's grace,
the gardener's musing on rows.

 

I love those lines and those little contentments. I’m fortunate and grateful that my life is full of them.

• Source: I have “The Want of Peace” in Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems; Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2012, p. 78. If I owned just a few books, that would be one of them. You can find the poem here:

https://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/619744598319824896/the-want-of-peace

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