By Ron Sinclair

For most of my life, if someone asked me “what person would you most like to visit and ask all the questions you wanted to ask, just so you could hear their answers?” My answer would have been Wendell Berry. I’ve lost my chance. Wendell died on Aug. 31 at the age of 92.

Wendell was a thoughtful, prolific writer who was comfortable communicating in any written or spoken form. Already, hundreds of columns and tributes describing him and his legacy are appearing in the news and social media. I won’t echo the details they share. Instead I want to say a few words about how his work has impacted my life. And if when reading this short essay, you have your own thoughts about how his work has impacted you, please share them in the comments, or message me privately.

I first became acquainted with Wendell Berry through his poetry. I loved his ability to communicate his thoughts in tight, highly descriptive and personal verse. He could say more in five lines than most writers can say in ten pages. His work is filled with depth and insight. His work is filled with the heart of a man who was comfortable living in paradox, struggling for reconciliation with the great truth to be found in such struggles. His essays best portrayed his struggle and eventual reconciliation with issues that were at the forefront of our country’s continuing work to define itself.

His book of essays The Unsettling of America, published in 1977 was my introduction to Berry’s prose. As someone who had grown up in the suburbs and lived most of his life until that time in the suburbs, these essays awakened me to a different way of living, valuing life itself instead of living for valuable things. I began reading everything I could find by him. At the same time, Marcia and I had moved to Dallas, Texas as part of my attempt to climb the corporate ladder. We were miserable, and ached to be home, living a different set of values, and offering them to our son. In 1980, we escaped to the farm, and have been here ever since.

I have already seen Berry’s best known poem all over social media since his passing.

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.

There are others, far too many to share in this essay. But I would like to close by sharing his poem, “Testament.” On this day, it seems fitting to share.

Testament

by Wendell Berry

And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that Unfathomable Grass…

1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.

2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!

3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face

With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.

4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.

He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.

From his collection: The Country of Marriage, published in 1973. “The Peace of Wild things” is from this collection as well.

© Ron Sinclair, August 25, 2026. Sinclair is a retired church musician and solo performer. Sinclair writes about aging, retirement, ‘the church,’ his farm, family and anything else he considers of interest.

Other essays by Ron Sinclair on the Appalachian Chronicle

Un-retired for a While

Lucy and Ethel

What We Value

The Worry Tree

More Than One Jesus?

Benevolent Larceny

The Church

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Lists

Kindness

Patriotism and Dissent