A man who understands the weather only terms of golf is participating in a public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.
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What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds.
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The change of mind I am talking about involves not just a change of knowledge, but also a change of attitude toward our essential ignorance, a change in our bearing in face of mystery. The principles of ecology, if we will take them to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend upon other lives and upon an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control. And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economy, we have been willing to change or destroy, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand. We are not humble enough or reverent enough.
Think Little: Essays by Wendel Berry.
I love Wendel Berry. He is one of those rare humans who focuses only on personal responsibilities and took upon the impossible task of raising awareness that only personal responsibilities can reduce suffering on this planet.
This little gem of a book was published in 1972. The book begins with a bigger picture of how we sapiens delude ourselves as makers of nature but he slowly exposes our delusions using his personal experience at his home town, a small town in Kentucky. The point is each one of us can rise to his level of awareness by being conscious of nature around our own home.
Within the first few months after Max came into my life, this place, a house became home. Thankfully, I understood that this is the place Max will live and we will make memories.
Max left me with tons and tons of memories in this place we called home. I will live here for the rest of my life and perish here in the same place as Max did. In the 1960s Wendel Berry went through a similar transformation and left the epic center of the literary world and returned back to his small Kentucky town.
I was to realize during the next few years how false and destructive and silly those ideas are. But even then I was aware that life outside the literary world was not without honorable precedent; if there was Wolfe, there was also Faulkner; if there was James, there was also Thoreau. But I had in my mind that made the greatest difference was the knowledge of the few square miles in Kentucky that were mine by inheritance and by birth and by the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.
What finally freed me from these doubts and suspicions was the insistence in what was happening to me that, far frin being bored and diminished and obscured to myself by my life here. I had grown more alive and more conscious than I had ever been.
What a beautiful sentence!
"And by the intimacy, the mind makes with the place it awakens in."
I am no Wendel Berry. My small body and mind awakened in whatever little ways by Max in this little place called home. Max showed me the beautify and wonder of this universe within the confines of our home. I will continue to experience this intimacy until my last breath.
Wendel Berry received national humanities award in 2010 from President Obama.
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