A Small Porch Quotes

“What I am sure of is that we have lost the old apprehension of Nature as a being accessible to imagination, linking Heaven and Earth, making and informing the incarnate creation, and requiring of humanity an obedience at once worshipful, ethical, and economic.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“The pattern for keeping this place
we must take from the woods, if
the land is to thrive in our using
...
---The woods
is a great life of many lives
living upon its many deaths.
It flourishes in the dark crypts
of its decay.
...
---To the teachable
it is a teaching, not a syllabus
of processes and nomenclature
reduced to human understanding, but
the presence of the world being
made, a fabric of interdependent wonders,
moment by moment completed in beauty,
leaf shadows on light leaves moving.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“Will the robotic tree perform
the original miracle, transforming
light into life?”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“What repair, what
return, will undo the consuming
self-belittlement that inherits,
disvalues, neglects, and ruins
the decent small farm-
the earned, kept, and cherished
good of a lifetime’s work
gone- to break the heart?

And yet the light comes.
And yet the light is here.
Over the long shadows
the late light moves
in beauty through the living woods.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“Again the air is full
of falling: the fall of the leaves
in the weighty season that brings
all home again to the lowly
miracle from which they came.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“What a wonder I was
when I was young, as I learn
by the stern privilege
of being old: how regardlessly
I stepped the rough pathways
of the hillside woods,
treaded hardly thinking
the tumbled stairways
of the steep streams, and worked
unaching hard days
thoughtful only of the work,
the passing light, the heat, the cool
water I gladly drank.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“Loving the forest,
you enter it to walk and watch.
As you observe its manifold and comely life,
it enters familiarly into imagination,
and so into sympathy. By sympathy
the mind in the forest is made at home.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation

“The communications technology that was
to become the concourse and meeting
of all the world, bringing the longed-for
peace to all the world, becomes
a weapon to break the world in pieces.”
― Wendell Berry, A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation