Good morning. This is one of those that I haven’t endured in awhile. It is 3:05AM. After lying awake for an hour and some minutes, I said to myself, if Maria gets up from her head against my leg, I will get up and write a post. It has been a month. This was a done deal, because Maria always gets up and leaves the warmth of bed at least once that I have noticed, in the times I would awaken for no reason other than that I awoke, within the middle of the night to go downstairs and use her box, or into the kitchen to drink some water from her bowl, or, perhaps just to prowl the house and to check on the whereabouts of Stella, who, six times out of ten, will be snoring on the couch. Both my cats snore.
Lately, I’ve been rereading a book by Wendell Berry. A book named The Long-Legged House(1). There is a chapter named, The Rise. It is about a flooding Kentucky River one year in, I think, the 1960s. I want to give you a paragraph from it (pg. 106): “If one imagines the shore line exactly enough as the division between water and land, and imagines it rising–it comes up too slowly for the eye usually, so one must imagine it–there is a sort of magic about it. As it moves upward it makes a vast change, far more than the eye sees. It makes a new geography, altering the boundaries of worlds. Above it, it widens the freehold of the birds, below it, that of the fish. The land creatures are driven back and higher up. It is a line between boating and walking, gill and lung, standing still and flowing. Along it, suddenly and continuously, all that will float is picked up and carried away: leaves, logs, seeds, little straws, bits of dead grass.//And also empty cans and bottles and all sorts of buoyant trash left behind by fishermen and hunters and picnickers, or dumped over creek banks by householders who sometimes drive miles to do it. …”
I woke up that hour plus ago with a thought about wisdom. Wisdom is available to everyone. Wisdom can be received. It can be mulled over. It can be imparted. To, within, from each of us.
But so, too, can ignorance. By the same participants.
We can be wise, and, sadly, we can be not wise.
Again from Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House: (pg. 60) “Since 1945 it has been generally acknowledged that the world is our dependent. It has been acknowledged, that is, that it is the dependent of those governments capable of atomic holocaust{or myriad holocausts, I would add}. But it is becoming more and more apparent, as we continue to contaminate the soil and water and air and to waste and misuse the natural wealth, that the world is also the dependent of private organizations and individuals… Because of the enormous increase in the economic and technological power of individuals, what once were private acts become public: the consequences are inevitably public. A man on a bulldozer can scarcely make a move that does not affect either his neighbors or his heirs…. {or this planet}
(pg. 61) “A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity… A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives {and all created life}. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”
(pg. 63) “…For man is not merely “in” the world. He is, he must realize and learn to say or be doomed, part of it. The earth he is made of he bears in trust.”
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(1)Berry, Wendell: The Long-Legged House, copyright 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969; Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. NY
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