What Wendell Berry Has All Figured Out

I put down Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home and said to my room mate, “you know, Wendell Berry is the man”, and proceeded to read out loud to him Berry’s nine line poem that he wrote for his friend’s funeral. The fact that I was reading poetry to a peer is indicative of just how powerful Berry’s writing really is. After reading that poem, I remembered another one of his poems that I had been forced to memorize in high school, a poem called The Wild Geese. I went back and read it, and was struck a second time by its powerful simplicity. The poem describes “horseback on a Sunday morning”, fields, clouds, persimmon seeds, geese, and other pieces of nature and finishes with the line “What we need is here.” It seems to me that Berry’s writing is so effective at describing the the simple existence of nature because it is so simple itself. This same simplicity in turn is what is so alluring about the Adirondacks. 

“What we need is here” is obviously something that we all can say. Food in the dining hall, friends a few steps away and academic pursuits seem to be “what we need,” but I think Wendell Berry meant more than simply “the basic necessities of life are here”. He meant that something here, in nature, is essential for our existence. Why do people go to the Adirondacks? Why do people go to the wilderness at all? Is it for the fresh? For the exercise? For the wildlife? For the simplicity. What Wendell Berry realized, and what I am beginning to realize, is that modern life is hectic, cluttered, cramped and what we really need is the open space, room to breathe, and the simplicity that only nature can provide.