Admittedly, I should have posted this yesterday to allow you all the time to Sabbath either on Saturday or Sunday with this Wendell Berry wafer. But as these days are full with life and activity, this post had to wait until now. And yet, the timelessness of Berry’s wisdom about “how to be alive” ever rings true and warrants a full week’s pondering. Don’t let the brevity of the poem deceive you; it is rich in its challenge to live, especially in a world ever looking for life in all the wrong places.
Sabbath Poem VI (2001) by Wendell Berry
The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worm hills tell, and some paintings of Paul Cézanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.
“VI” by Wendell Berry from This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems. © Counterpoint, 2013: pg. 222.
the deepening ground 
Leave a comment