Remarks for SKD's Poetry and Storytelling Night, 11/4/2026

There are days, even after great joys and triumphs, which feel unsettling. Our theme for tonight is calm, but anxieties come from any number of directions. Nowadays, this is part of the complexity we have built into the world, a complexity that cannot always be simply dismissed. We have crafted great systems which do more than extract resources or entertain us perpetually. We can trace the particles at the creation of the universe, transplant necessary organs, and give rights to more through efficient systems. Those before us could not imagine all this, and we ourselves struggle to understand what power we actually wield. So I want to go to Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things" for a moment to try and reset. Is there another complexity we should bear witness to?

The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Berry speaks of a "despair for the world" growing in him, making him reactive. "[T]he least sound" wakes him and he worries about his life and his children's lives. He is weighted with the future, weighted by expectations eminently reasonable. You have to panic a bit about your life or your children's lives! That is life, no? But we know the trap which catches most of us. As soon as you start doing that, you've unleashed a whole line of speculative reasoning, a whole specter composed of people and things you cannot control. You're going to want certain expectations to be met--you've got a specific goal in mind--but that's only for a moment. Your goals must change as you think about what else could happen.

So Berry goes and lies down in the woods. There's the "wood drake" enjoying his own beauty, a heron feeding. There is no "forethought / of grief." "Still water" is merely, solidly present, not an ever flowing, ever turbulent river like the one Heraclitus invokes. Maybe change happens, but it can be slowed. The stars are blind to the day and the day is blind to them. There's a unity in the "grace of the world" Berry claims to reside in, a nook that seems to briefly suspend the fact of change, the fact of time. And in this he claims freedom.

It's a powerfully romantic notion and it works. I imagine many of you are feeling calmer already. I don't think it's appropriate to bring up our attempts to master or conquer nature and the particular benefits arising from them. We want to know if we can feel the peace of wild things, too, and that request is perfectly fine. Maybe even natural. The question I have, the question I suspect we can try to answer tonight, is how else we can achieve calm. A neo-romantic poetic space which manifests the forest is one way. But there are others.