The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry's most widely read poem, published in 1968 in the collection Openings. Eight lines describing the practice of leaving the bed where despair grows and anxiety accumulates, going to where the wood drake rests on the water and the great heron feeds, and entering "the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief." The poem's power is diagnostic: it names the condition of waking at night, unable to rest, mind racing with anticipation of disaster—a condition that has become, in the AI age, the default setting of the knowledge worker's nervous system. The poem proposes a remedy: deliberate entry into the presence of creatures who do not possess forethought, who exist in the present tense, whose existence creates a space into which the human can enter and rest. Not permanently. As a practice. As the discipline of allowing yourself, for a period with no productive justification, to be a creature among creatures, present to the world as it is