I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle... Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. _x000D_ What I fear in it leaves it, And the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song.
Interpretation
The quote expresses how being in nature can lead to inner peace and confrontation with one's fears.
Wendell Berry's quote reflects the transformative power of nature, illustrating how sitting still among trees allows one to find calmness amidst life's chaos. As the speaker engages with their fears in this tranquil setting, they discover that facing these fears brings a sense of clarity and liberation, much like the stillness of water disturbed by a gentle ripple.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a motivational speech about mindfulness and nature.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening, reminiscences of our sanest hours. The voice of nature is always encouraging.
If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.
People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.
I think, on a personal level, everybody, when you go through the checkout line after you get your groceries and they say, 'Paper or plastic?' We should be saying, 'Neither one.' We should have our own cloth bags.
When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it.
We soon get through with nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy.
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