Quote of the Day (Wendell Berry, on Community Health)

“I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”—American novelist, poet, essayist, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays (2002)

(The image accompanying this post, showing Wendell Berry standing before the solar panels on his farm in Henry County, KY, was taken on Dec. 14, 2011, by Guy Mendes.)

Quote of the Day (Wendell Berry, on How Artists Deal With ‘The Problem of Limits’)

“It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.”— American novelist, poet, essayist, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics,” Harper’s, May 2008

(The image accompanying this post, showing Wendell Berry standing before the solar panels on his farm in Henry County, KY, was taken on Dec. 14, 2011, by Guy Mendes.)

Quote of the Day (Wendell Berry, on ‘When Despair for the World Grows in Me’)

“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.”—American poet, novelist, critic, and environmentalist activist Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things,” from The Peace of Wild Things (2018) 

I took this image of a blue heron in Sea Pines Forest Preserve while on vacation in Hilton Head, SC, in November 2014

Quotes of the Day (Norman Maclean and Wendell Berry, on Water and Earth)

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”—Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (1976)

"The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most
pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our
only legitimate hope."—Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1978)

I took the photo accompanying this post at Ramapo Mountain Reservation in Mahwah, N.J.