I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. –Wendell Berry, “Standing Ground”

The 92-year-old poet Wendell Berry died a month ago at his 125-acre farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he’d lived for six decades. The author of more than 50 books, including fiction, essays, and poetry, President Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal in 2012. Berry also became the first living author inducted into the Kentucky Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2015. His poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” is beloved and often quoted. Wary of technology, Berry refused to buy a computer, preferring to write in longhand. As a poet and farmer, he loved the land and people of his home.

In their September 1st NPR broadcast, “Beloved writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry has died at age 92,” Tilda Wilson and Noah Adams paid tribute to Berry, who began his career as an academic and English professor at New York University. But not for long. Wilson and Adams cite his 1968 essay, A Native Hill, in which Berry recounted his decision to leave the city and return to Kentucky:

I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life.

I never had the opportunity to hear Berry read his work in person. As a devotee and fellow poet, I’ve admired him from afar. And yet, I’ve grieved the loss of Wendell Berry perhaps more deeply than I should. I grieved as if I knew him well. I’ve grieved as the daughter of a poet. Because in Wendell Berry, I find my father. And through Berry’s death, I feel my father’s loss as sharply as I did ten years ago.

In my father’s book, Every Mouth of Autumn Says Goodbye, he confessed that “[a]s good as it is to love the world, it’s better to work lovingly hard on the local.” Like Berry, he loved his home. When I was 12, he interviewed for an administrative position at a larger university in another state. And he refused it, choosing to stay in Nebraska for the rest of his life. Although he traveled some with my mother after retirement, in truth, he would’ve been happy to stay home in Kearney, Nebraska. In the foreword to the Nebraska English Journal, Fall/Winter 89/90, my father contends that writers “come to a place and its people wanting a familiarity and felt knowledge”:

They are the ones in whom local geographies thrive. They are the ones committed by love to a people, a place. If Nebraskans want to know where they live, they would do well to turn to their poets, those whose best verse is still mapping the state.    

The “local geographies” of Kearney, Nebraska, and Port Royal, Kentucky, will continue to thrive in the poetry of their native sons, Don Welch and Wendell Berry.

In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, Wendell Berry expounds upon the difference between a path and a road:

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

To love the local is to love a path, which is “a habit that comes with knowledge of a place,” a “form of contact with a known landscape.” Only locals know where the paths are, for they’re generally not clearly marked. Forged from the feet of locals whose familiarity with and respect for the land guides them, paths are deeply intimate. In my mind, I can move along the path through the nature center where I walk. I can see each turn, each bench under its respective tree, each fallen log where the turtles sun. In Remembering, Wendell Berry writes that “[t]here comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.” As I walk each day, I’ve come to know this longing.

In his poem, “Sabbaths, 1999, VII,” Berry reminds us of the peace and pleasure found in small, local things:

Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.

Like Berry, I find myself resuming the “long lesson,” particularly when the voice of discontent whispers, “Is this all there is? Is this all you’ve done?” I suppose I take solace in the knowledge that Berry had to resume this lesson again and again. I suspect my father did, too. And yet, they stayed the course, believing the treasures of their respective locales were as rich and worthy as any.

Throughout his life, Berry was a passionate environmentalist and a critic of industrialized farming. In “Wendell Berry’s Life on Earth” (Blue Ridge Public Radio, Sept. 9, 2026), Katie Myers writes that Berry’s “answer to the fundamental question of how to live right was to start small — to revere the Earth’s endless beauty, and to work a little, each day, to reverse the harm we’ve caused.” She cites his 1972 essay, “Think Little,” in which he wrote, “There is no public crisis that is not also private.” As the environmental movement was growing, he argued that “The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.” To love the local is to protect it and to count the costs of what we do in the name of progress.

Berry argued, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” While some disregard their locales as provincial and ordinary, Berry regards them as sacred. So did my father, whose poetry is grounded in his love for his home. He believed that “[e]very great poem begins with a locale—it speaks about an immediate place. Every great poem never forgets its parent. But then that poem, like a child, can go into the world at large and end up thousands of miles away from where it was parented.” His and Berry’s poems bring us into their unique locales, the “ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees” and the edge of the Platte River where “a long sandbar has risen like an ancient whale, head down, its flukes thrust into the land.” But they also “go into the world at large,” celebrating and yet transcending the local. Through them, we get the best gifts of both worlds: the parent and child, the local and universal.

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.

–Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things,” Openings, 1968