{"id":9621,"date":"2024-12-16T13:26:43","date_gmt":"2024-12-16T17:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wendell-berry-on-creativity-and-love-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-12-16T13:26:43","modified_gmt":"2024-12-16T17:26:43","slug":"wendell-berry-on-creativity-and-love-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wendell-berry-on-creativity-and-love-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cEnough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,\u201d Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan<\/a> an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem<\/a>, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually \u2014 capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the secular church of self-improvement goads us to be more in order to do more. <\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, to take a sabbath is a radical act, an act of countercultural act of courage and resistance, none more radical than a sabbath taken in nature \u2014 that eternal pasture of enoughness, which knew from the outset to create just enough more matter than antimatter for the first small seed of something to bloom into everything; which knows daily to make everything, from the electron to the elephant, take up just as much space and energy as it needs to be exactly what it is; which made every life finite and set a limit even to the speed of light. <\/p>\n

To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too<\/a>; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation\u2019s cold hard edge of not-enough. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art from The Fate of Fausto<\/em><\/a> by Oliver Jeffers \u2014 a modern fable about the existential triumph of enoughness, inspired by Vonnegut<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry<\/a>, who once defined wisdom as \u201cthe art of minimums,\u201d<\/a> takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a \u201crich and demanding\u201d idea that \u201cgains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature\u2019s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,\u201d a place where \u201cthe natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the preface, Berry considers how nature calibrates expectation \u2014 even in the creative act itself, where inspiration is not a reach for more but a letting be of what is, a surrender to reality, which is miracle enough:<\/p>\n

\n

On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams\u2026 In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations \u2014 other people\u2019s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In how it thrives on the freedom from expectation, in how it demands a total surrender and breaks the moment it is demanded of, creativity has a lot in common with love. It may be that nature invented love to teach us the art of enoughness \u2014 to learn how to open the heart to another without condition or expectation, to be fully welcomed in another heart in order to learn the hardest axiom of being: that we are, and always were, enough. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Love\u2019s salutary alchemy of enoughness comes alive in the second part of Berry\u2019s eight-part sabbath poem of 1994:<\/p>\n