When I heard the news of Wendell Berry’s recent death at ninety-two years old, the image that came to mind was of American history as an enormous circus tent, the center pole of which had just collapsed. This battered tent, besieged by corruption, dishonesty, greed and cruelty—infested with clowns—had lost a mainstay of environmental sanity, decency, and political wisdom.  So many centers of political power in the world have become, instead of governing bodies, opportunistic justifications for violence and profit taking. Wendell Berry’s wise voice was there asking the right question:  Do we want to survive on this miraculous planet in the company of millions of other miraculous species, or are we willing to squander it all so a handful of people can be richer than god?

It was nearly twenty-five years ago that I began painting the Americans Who Tell The Truth portraits. Along with Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, Berry was one of the first five. He belongs in that company whose eloquent voices and decades—long activism gave example to millions of people about how to live sustainable and proportional lives in harmony with nature and each other. The quote that I scratched into his portrait is from the closing of an essay he wrote in 1991 at the end of the first Gulf War: “The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.” He’s making the point that “leaders” willingly sacrifice the lives of their nation’s children—and murder other people’s children—for the profit of markets, control of resources and territory, while promoting economies of excess and waste . . . for, in short, power.

Berry’s words, like those of the other people I’ve mentioned, are critical because they are true, are politically accurate and morally correct. When we talk today about intersectionality, it’s the intersection of truth, politics, and morality where we want to build our understanding and strength. Wendell Berry lived in that nexus.

In 1968 Berry wrote his most famous poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” which asks the question of what to do when he can’t sleep at night because of his despair for the world:

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear for what my life and my children’s lives may be, . . .

At that time the Vietnam War and protests against it were raging, millions of acres of forest and farmland were being “developed,’’ the atmosphere and waters were absorbing more and more toxins, culture and politics were in turmoil. Berry lay awake at night not only despairing about this situation but knowing that his life and his children’s lives were involved—not simply as victims, but as participants. Anxiety over the destruction of nature burrows much deeper in us when we realize that the economic, production and transportation systems doing the damage include all of us in one way or another. When we cry out against the machine, we have to admit we’re parts in that machine—sometimes fueling, sometimes profiting, mostly enjoying its comforts.

Berry wants to free himself and his children from complicity in the work of his antagonist, so:

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. . . .

Berry is aware that he can’t return—none of us really can—to a state of nature.

Rather he relishes that: 

. . . For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.*

Wendell Berry dedicated his adult life to blazing the trail for all of us, approaching that sense of freedom. His essays, novels, and poems promote the building of sustainable systems and the joy engendered by making that effort.

In his poem “Before Dark” Berry watches a kingfisher at dusk flying down the river, like a skipped stone,  splashing in the water—not to hunt fish, but for sheer exhilaration. Finally the kingfisher flies out of hearing, and Berry says:

 . . . Somewhere
the night had accommodated him

—at the place he was headed for 
or where, led by his delight,
he came.**

I’m quite sure that through the kingfisher Berry was expressing Thomas Jefferson’s demand for all people—the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Without those splashes in the water, life can be a pretty grim business.

*The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint Press, 2009)

**New Collected Poems (Counterpoint Press, 2012)