Winter 2019/2020 Issue

“An Inventory of Wonders”

with Wendell Berry & Friends

by Carrie Rehak

“I leave labor and load,
Take up a different story.
I keep an inventory
Of wonders and of uncommercial goods."
Wendell Berry, excerpted from Sabbaths – 1979, IV

Wendell Berry. I count him among my inventory of wonders. Wonders that slow if not still me. That open and swell me. That guild my grief with gratitude. That reconnect me with we.

Wendell Berry—father, farmer, activist, writer—calls such wonders by name: Wood drake. Heron. Still water. With words he evokes the wordlessness of wonder. From the same Sabbath poem, quoted above:

"I leave work’s daily rule
And come here to this restful place
Where music stirs the pool
And from high stations of the air
Fall notes of wordless grace,
Strewn remnants of the primal Sabbath’s hymn."

Berry suggests that his Sabbath poems, which he has composed on Sundays for decades, since 1979—"in silence, in solitude, mainly outdoors"—be read in a similar contemplative spirit.

Contemplation, I am discovering, is at the heart of wonder — as well as the core of compassion, creativity, and nonviolence. In Laudato Si Pope Francis writes: "Inner peace is closely related to care for ecology and for the common good because, lived out authentically, it is reflected in a balanced lifestyle together with a capacity for wonder which takes us to a deeper understanding of life…. Many people today sense a profound imbalance which drives them to frenetic activity and makes them feel busy, in a constant hurry which in turn leads them to ride rough-shod over everything around them." Quoting social luminary and religious leader Joan Chittister. OSB: “If anything has brought the world to the brink of destruction, it must surely be the loss of Sabbath.” 

Sabbath and other forms of "slow time" not only renew and reconnect us, they are also a powerful form of resistance. Rest protects us and others, human and other-than-human, from exploitation. Quoting Barbara Brown Taylor, "Sabbath is not only God’s gift to those who have voices to say how tired they are; Sabbath is also God’s gift to the tired fields, the tired vines, the tired vineyard, the tired land."

In my “Introduction to Slow Time,” I confess that I am a shamelessly slow learner of slow time, even given my many wise and patient mentors. Among other instructors, I mention poetry and my own practice in art as prime teachers. Mainly in paintings and in sketches I record my inventory of wonders: An egret at dusk. Sandhill Cranes migrating through Lodi. The red outline of a pony silhouetted in early morning sun on New Year’s day. Water. Sky. What I call "fluid luminosity": contemplations of light, natural and supernatural, fleeting and eternal.

What calls for your attention? What enlarges your heart? Do you praise such wonders in prose or do memorialize them in poetry? Paint them? Pray them? Play them? Dance them? Sit with them silently?

If you are willing, please share your wonders with us here?

HearWendell Berry recite two of his Sabbath poems and other works.

During this Christmas season I will be donating 10% of my income, in thanksgiving, to Incarnation Monastery, in Berkeley, CA.