Where no path is worn

 I think of Wendell Berry as an essayist, but I tend to read his poetry. 

He made it a practice to spend Sunday mornings in the woods, just being quiet and listening. A Timbered Choiris a collection of his Sabbath poems from 1979 to 1997. Here’s the beginning of II from 1979: 

 

Another Sunday morning comes

And I resume the standing Sabbath

Of the woods, where the finest blooms

Of time return, and where no path

 

Is worn but wears its makers out

At last, and disappears in leaves

Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut

Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

 

In the risen season. Past life lives

In the living.

 

Berry called himself an amateur poet. He said he did the work for the love of the work to his own satisfaction. Those were two of the conditions of self-employment, he said.

I’m not a poet. But, like Berry, I’m a self-employed woods walker. And like Berry, I sometimes find that my mind seems open and aware for a moment. I see things that I had overlooked — those “finest blooms” that I previously had been in too much of a hurry to see.

I get a whiff of what these poems are about. I tend to come back to them. I can’t imagine a spiritual life that doesn’t grow out of the natural world.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, p. 6.