There’s an important poet who deserves to be invited to an Earth Day Practice. His work as an eco-theologian-poet-activist is worth savouring. And on Earth Day, a day when the wilderness of our inner landscape is threatened because the wild gifts of all living things on the planet are in peril, the gift of these words is an invitation to open and receive.

Enjoy this poem and a blessing I’ve written inspired by it. Take a moment to read this poem through three times slowly, savouring the words, and slowly allowing them to metabolize in you. Notice which word or phrase moves you the most.

“The Peace of Wild Things” By 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.

This poem is an excerpt from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

A Blessing Inspired by Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” by Christa Hesselink

May we allow the darkness in our reality to rise

so that we will

lie down into the Light.

May we rest by still waters

and sink into the peace

of our shepherded wilderness.

May we wait well with the stars overhead

and listen deeply to their illuminating voices, saying,

“All is well here in your wild dark.”

May we discover the pulses of hope