Heard this the other day on The Writer's Almanac, one of my regular podcasts. It's from Wendell Berry, and as I heard it as I went for a jog in the foothills of Santa Fe, NM, during my week of study leave in which I was feeding at a banquet table of friendship and scholarship, coming hard on the heels of a really wonderful and quiet Christmas with my little family, I had to note how beautifully it describes why I didn't blog a word over these last 3 weeks.
"On the days I am lucky/ or blessed, I am silent..."
VII
by Wendell Berry
I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.
"VII" from the poem "1994" by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997. © Counterpoint, 1998.
It is funny, my best friend and I mentioned this yesterday when we were on the phone with each other-sometimes we call wanting to catch up and just be on the line with a cherished friend, but nothing is the matter, so there is not much to say. We talk about the weather, how his tour is doing, how work is for me blah, blah, then we hit a dry spell. We have finally come to the point sometimes when we are just quiet on the phone, just enjoying each others company. When life is good, you don't have much to say. How true a statement.
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