The Healthy Spiritual Journey • October 2026: Wendell Berry, Peaceful Farmer

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“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief." –– Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026)

Peaceful farmer, Wendell Berry, was an author, poet, environmental activist, and cultural critic. He was a man who understood the land intimately because he grew up on a Kentucky tobacco farm and returned to his childhood homeland to write and farm for the last sixty years of his life. He was a defender of nature, God’s gift to us that informs our souls. Berry and I share a Kentucky, small farm heritage. We know the rhythm of early morning chores, the earthy smell of curing tobacco, and the way a community gathers around its church. We know that the land demands honesty, consistency, and disciplined care. If we do it right, the land will give back peace in return – with or without a harvest. 

One of Berry’s most appreciated poems, ‘The Peace of Wild Things’, reminds us that creation itself carries a kind of divine steadiness. Wild things do not worry about tomorrow; they do not measure their worth by productivity or achievement. They simply live as God made them – present, attentive, and unburdened. When Berry writes of coming into the peace of wild things, he is describing a spiritual posture: stepping out of anxious human striving and stepping into peaceful trust in God’s world. 

Wendell Berry did not simply write about the need to care for our fragile earth, he lived on his small farm, practicing what he preached. On the farm, you know that worry never makes the rain come nor does it guarantee a successful harvest. Patience and faithfulness matter – doing the work that aligns with our values, caring for the land, caring for our neighbors, and caring for this miraculous planet that God entrusted to us. Berry urges us to be good stewards: living in a way that matches our words, protecting the earth that sustains us, honoring the communities that raise us, and remembering that nature is not a resource to exploit, but a gift to cherish. 

Berry says: “Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence.” When life becomes noisy, when responsibilities pile high, when the world feels out of balance, consider a walk in nature. Find the green spaces. Look for the peace of wild things, and remember God’s assurance that our value is not held in accomplishments, but in God’s incredible grace. “Sit and be still [in nature]” he says “…and you are where breathing is prayer.”

This peaceful farmer wrote against the atrocities of war while being a proponent of the peaceful life of wild things under “the day blind stars waiting for their light”. “The Christian gospel” he said “is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.” Wendell Berry was an agrarian and ecological prophet whose writings will live on to influence generations to come. May he rest in God’s love, and be a peaceful farmer in paradise.  

In God’s love,

Lanny F. Wilson, MD

"Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" –– Matthew 6:26