What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? (Job 38:24-30)

In our condo’s patio area the squirrels are robbing the big sunflower seeds I put out for the cardinals; tufted titmouses (titmice?), nuthatches, and chickadees are trading turns at the feeder; the yew bushes are slumped to the ground again after yesterday’s  one-foot snowfall; our neighbor’s crabapple tree is providing cover for forty-some sparrows, twenty-some juncos, a couple pairs of cardinals, and a few house finches; the golf course behind us is in deep hibernation providing for our eyes a sort of frozen Zen garden; and the snow-laden clouds have grudgingly given way to reveal an almost royal blue sky allowing our star to reflect blinding brightness into unshielded eyes.

This is my place on the earth—the place I’m most intimate with. Since I grew up at the edge of town and spent much of my spare time in pastures, woodlands, and wetlands, I’m probably more broadly aware of the natural aspects of my place than the average person.  Most folks I know likely did not experience falling through pond ice into the mush of a partially submerged muskrat hut and have to walk a half mile home with frozen pant legs clacking against each other and rubbing their legs raw.  So I know that the ice is always thinner around the edges of muskrat huts.  And I also know that inept milking of Ayrshire cattle with impossibly small teats does the same stiffening thing to your pants—besides making them smell terribly sour!  When the wind comes up as it’s supposed to do today, I know enough not to walk under snow-bent conifer boughs unless I am prepared for an avalanche from the overburdened branches.

But who needs that kind of knowledge today?  And what does the lack of such a need have to say about our manner of living and our understanding of the true nature of our places?  Wendell Berry is one who in his writing has taken me further than anyone else in understanding that one cannot really have or understand “community” if the natural world around us is not included in that community—deliberately included, not by necessity or by accident.  Berry writes: “Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed.” Wendell Berry, “The Regional Motive” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 67

If you’ve not discovered the writings of Wendell Berry, but want to treat yourself—and challenge your heart and conscience—begin to familiarize yourself with his works.  Berry is a Christian and biblical in his worldview, though he likely would not claim the designation “evangelical.”  But if we learned only from the works and thoughts of evangelicals—especially in the area of caring for creation and seeing the importance and place of nature in what we call “our community”—we would suffer from an extreme lack of knowledge and understanding.

Below are a couple of articles to start with.

This one will really put the mind and heart into high gear:
Christianity and the Survival of Creation

This is one of my favorites—from Sierra Magazine.  It includes one of the finest articulations of the right to life that I have read, and raised a ruckus with many of the magazine’s pro-choice readers:
The Obligation of Care

Much more can be gleaned from “his” Website.
[Note the disclaimer--that it is the site of his fans, not his.  Berry shuns computers.]

Let me leave you with a quote—one of his more popular poems, and one of my favorites:

The Peace of Wild Things

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.

[Wood drake: E. J. Peiker.  See his wonderful nature photography at his Photos of the Month site]