I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing Daffodils;
Along the Lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee: --
A poet could not but be gay
In such a laughing company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

Watch Here: Narrated 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 might be,br 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.

Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air

as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,

do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

The neighbor calls the Siberian Elm
a “weed” tree, demands we hack
it down, says the leaves overwhelm
his property, the square backyard.

He’s collar-and-tie. A weed tree?
Branches screen buildings, subway tracks,
his patch of yard. We disagree,
claim back the sap, heartwood, wild bark.

He declares the tree “hazardous.”
We shelter under leaf-hoard, crossway
for squirrels, branch house for sparrows, jays.
The balcony soaks up the shade.

Chatter-song drowns out cars below.
Sun branches down. Leaves overwhelm.
The tree will stay. We tell him “no.”
Root deep through pavement, Elm.

I feel a quiet joy
seeing a single wild rose—
the way it holds sunlight
in its fragile bowl.

I could learn from the forest.
How with outstretched limbs
she receives the rain. Allows
water pour over her in a
baptismal ritual
without admission to anyone
or anything. How she
never turns away
her own nourishment
from feeling unworthy.

1.
grief is a river in the sky,
atmospheric - it presses against
everything it touches.

2.
pyrophytes wait patiently
until fire sweeps through the forest,
leaving ash and charred trunks and burnt soil
released with the rain, they replenish the land
as if unburying
holiness.

3.
not even death could take away her
beauty. her skin pale blooms of wild hollyhock,
her spirit alight like a cathedral of wildflowers
after the burn.

4.
ephemerals in her eyes,
i watch my mother exhale
one last time.

4.
a body of ashes, so(i)(u)l ripe for growth.

5.
wildfires allow more sunlight to reach
the forest floor.

6.
after my mother’s death I learned
to sip small shafts of light,
like a bird sipping a flower in
self-consecration.

7.
fireweed knows how to grow among death.

8.
grief is atmospheric, it releases a
river within.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes dawn to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Nature absorbed some of my pain.
A teal blue sky wisped with clouds to the south,
a washed-out indigo blue to the north,
and a million points of light green, buds and tiny leaves
bursting forth everywhere.

[ … ]

Slowly, my jaw, held tight, began to slacken.

[ … ]

A breeze peeled back my mudcovered arm hairs
and smoothed a little wrinkle out of both my eyebrows as I got up.

[ … ]

I suddenly realized how different I felt.

[ … ]

My heart pumped away as usual but my mind had stopped.
I smiled. I breathed.