Image is from https://poets.org/poet/wendell-berry
I am saddened that I came to know about Wendell Berry so late in life. I had heard his name mentioned here and there over the past few years, but it was last year that I started to pay attention. He could have been anywhere in the world but he chose the simple life. He chose silence. He chose nature. He chose to care about the world and about you and me. In choosing simplicity, the cries of society caught his ear, and he chose to root himself in one place and write, giving birth to all types of writing that inspire and convict.
I am drawn to this. Writing is a calling, and it can only be done in silence, away from screens, voices, and cultural interruptions. Within the writer is a whisper, a still, small voice teaching us about ourselves and worldviews. Yet once we write it down, we are also fulfilling a calling to tell the world something about those revelations. When I am busy and distracted, I cannot hear that voice. But when I remove myself from all the other voices that scream for my attention, and I am still and silent, then the whisper returns.
I can always tell when God is calling me to write something, and that is the persistent whisper, a flicker of flame kindled deep in my heart that refuses to go out. I can also tell when God is NOT telling me to write something too. I will get an idea that may seem interesting, but I wait for a few days. If that thought is forgotten, then I know it was just a passing thought. But when, after days, the whisper continues, without me having to write down the idea or work to recall it, when it keeps whispering to me over and over, all day, every day, and it is in my dreams and with me as I drive along, whispering in the silence after all the noise has died, then I know God is calling me to write.
Every blog post, book, article, or literary creation I have written comes to me this way, and I write it only after I have been silent with the whisper for several days. This is why Wendell Berry was so impactful. He relished the silence and simplicity of life. He chose the farm and the tree over titles and screens. He did not write to get attention or to make money, but he wrote from that whisper in the silence that called him to tell the world what God wanted him to say. I wish I had more time with him. I wish that, even at 92 years old, he had more time with us. May the lessons he taught us continue to teach us, because what we write has a lasting impact long after we are gone.
I am most inspired by a collection of books written thousands of years ago, and the most inspirational Book is even older than that. This Book was there at the beginning of time and still speaks to me today. When I rise in the morning, it is the first thing I look at. Before I look at my phone, before I go on my computer, before I eat, before I read or look at anything else, I read this Book because, “In the beginning was the Word.” It is powerful than any sword could ever be. The Word was used to speak the world into existence and to sustain it. The Word was given to us when God breathed into us the breath of life. Life and death are in the power of THE WORD that is spoken and written, and Wendell Berry chose to use that powerful and sacred gift, given to all of us by the Creator, to speak life. May his poem, “How to Be a Poet,” inspire you to sit in the silence. Listen to the whisper of your soul and write something that shows how your heart is changing through its revelations. Maybe what you write will change the world.
Anika Prather 