A month and a half ago, my favorite author, Wendell Berry, died. I believe those of us who call ourselves Berryites have a responsibility to keep his memory—and, more importantly, the ideas and values he stood for—alive.
I write this because I wouldn’t be the person I am today without Wendell Berry, or without one of my college professors, Terence Ball, who introduced me to his work.
Berry was a modern-day agrarian who championed sustainable communities, a deeper relationship with the land, and a more responsible approach to our economy, particularly his opposition to the industrialization of agriculture.
Two days ago, I tried to rank my ten favorite Berry essays. Then fifteen. Then twenty. It was a fool’s errand.
For one thing, Berry had something worth saying in nearly every essay. Why would I want to encourage people to limit their reading to the ones I happened to like best? More importantly, as I skimmed through essay after essay looking for candidates for my list, I kept finding passages that made me stop and think again about what is important to me and what I revere. Eventually, I realized I had no idea where the cutoff should be.
So, instead of pretending I can identify the “best” Berry essays, I think that over the next month or so I’ll share some of the passages that have stayed with me and see whether they affect others the way they affected me—and, occasionally, my very enthusiastic highlighting pen.
For today, though, I want to focus less on what Wendell Berry wrote and more on what his writing did to me.
To begin with, every time a new collection of his essays came out, it felt like my birthday. I was giving myself a gift: a book that would provide hours of reading while making me look at the world—and my place in it—a little differently, and hopefully a little more wisely. I am sad those so-called “birthdays” are over.
That said, each book, and nearly every essay, made me want to be a better gardener, a better community member, a better steward of resources, and, ultimately, a better person.
I can’t say I became much of an environmentalist, at least not in the way we usually use that word. Berry himself had his reservations about the term. But gardening became one small way for me to live out some of what I was learning. Once I discovered heirloom seeds, I became even more interested in the food growing just outside my back door rather than relying entirely on food that, on average, traveled some 1,500 miles to reach me.
But more than anything, Berry’s writing made me want to be a better person—a person whose values weren’t simply things I professed, but things I tried to live by.
That desire for consistency became particularly important in how I thought about two roles in my own life. First, spiritually, I wanted “to build and find community in the things that help me be joyful and powerful, and which put me in a place to create the greatest change.” Second, I thought of myself as a home economist. Part of that role meant seeing my home as a place where I could act responsibly, rooted in the past, present, and future. In maintaining the house and home, I wanted to “build in its simplicity and richness.”
With his death, I put more thought into a handful of values that I believe Berry would have cherished, too:
• Doubt: Never believe or act as if I know it all. I don’t. To believe otherwise would be hubris.
• Gratitude: Recognize that much of what I have is a gift or privilege of some sort. Because I have received those gifts, I have a responsibility to treat them with deep appreciation and care.
• Hope: Understand hope as an active verb—the value that pushes me to fight for social, economic, and environmental justice rather than simply wish for a better world.
• Reverence: Find awe in this planet and its incredible diversity, and strive to help the life on it thrive.
• Stewardship: Be a good steward of what I can influence: my home, my garden, my community, my work, and the resources entrusted to me.
Over the years, I came to think deeply about these values—not as abstract ideals, but as things I wanted to practice in my everyday life. Wendell Berry’s writing continually pushed me to ask whether the way I was living reflected what I said I valued. Was I grateful? Was I hopeful enough to act? Was I paying attention to the world around me? Was I being a good steward of what had been entrusted to me? Was I willing to admit what I didn’t know?
I suspect that is what I will carry with me most from Wendell Berry. His writing didn’t simply give me ideas to think about; it gave me questions to keep asking myself. And perhaps that is the best way I can keep his memory alive—not simply by continuing to read his words, but by trying, however imperfectly, to live in a way that makes those words matter.
