The Peace of Remembering

 Often when I awaken and am immediately arrested by anxious thoughts and cannot seem to move toward a calmer contemplative state, I remember the Wendell Berry poem and metaphorically “lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”

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.

But lately that poem has not provided the solace it once did as though my anxiety broke through a vaccinated immunity anyway. I needed a new innoculation…When I wrestled with the poem, saying it with different emphasis, repeating it excruciatingly slowly, the word “remember” kept rising and illuminating. Illuminating what? peace? grace?

Previously I was struck by “day blind stars waiting” and conjured their beckoning as invitation to consolation. But today something new emerged.

I allowed myself to free fall into remembrances until I landed gently on Joy Harjo’s poem which seemed to incorporate the peace of wild things as well as expanding memories of peace more extensively. 

So this morning when that crazy mind chatter started up I began a litany of memories and turned confusion into curiosity about others’ stories. I felt small, calm and strangely instrumental. I rested in that grace of memory and felt the liberation.

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

+ Joy Harjo