Saturday, May 1, 2021

My turn to teach an essay: “Getting Along With Nature,” by Wendell Berry

    In the last MFA class I took online from UA Monticello, Creative Non-Fiction, each student had to "teach" one of the essays in the text, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Non-Fiction. This is my lesson:

            I chose this essay because I own and have read Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Also, because I must get along with nature to keep privet, sawbriars, English ivy, hackberry shoots and blackberry vines from inching, like kudzu, closer and closer to my house.

            Berry’s first thesis is that neither pure nature nor purely human estates are livable for very long; there must be a shared condition. I agree with poet Edmund Spenser that nature is a “sort of earthly lieutenant of God. . .”

            [Required discussion question for class: Describe one of your battles with nature.]

            Berry comes to see that nature and human culture—wildness and domesticity—are not opposed but are interdependent.” Do you agree? Why or why not?

            The example he gives about what happened to the bird sanctuary after the Papago Indians left shows the need for collaboration. I fight, verbally through the open window, the squirrels eating the bird seed when they seem to disdain the faux corn I attach to the maple tree. Share another example of the cross purposes of nature and humans.

            Berry’s face-to-beak experience with the hawk elicited smiles. Have you ever experienced a close-up stand-off with an animal or bird not counting your pets? I have. Twice—with a neighbor’s dog resulting in a bite each time. I finally learned NOT to go over there!

            His final paragraph describes the difference between animals with primarily physical appetites, and humans, who also have mental appetites that can be “more gross and capacious than physical ones.”

            On page 24, he refers to scale—“If the human economy is to be fitted into the natural economy in such a way that both may thrive, the human economy must be built to scale.” Can you give examples in your area where this is lacking? Mine is the packed subdivision on my north—all houses, small yards, newly-planted trees. But still . . .

            Page 25 is what I want to emphasize: “Every farm (in my case, an acre), should have . . . places where nature is given a free hand, where no human work is done. . .” I’ve decided the southwest corner is the spot that I’ll leave as is. Birds live there. Vines live there. Crape myrtles live there. Do you have a place in your grounds that could be left alone to nature?

[Text: Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Non Fiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, edited by Lex Williford & Michael Martone, Simon & Schuster, 2007.]

            With the spring rains and warmer weather after the long spell of cold and snow, trees, bushes, grasses and perennials have reacted accordingly. Except for the apparently-frozen gardenias’ brown-leafed limbs, nothing else seems to be affected. Even the loropetalum that I thought had frozen, revived. Even the hydrangeas have put on new foliage, though they may not bloom this year. Thankfully, the lows are predicted to be in the 50s and 60s at night. After that, it should be safe to take any indoor plants (except African violets?) outside for the rest of spring and until October.

            Happy gardening, and enjoy nature. After all, it has the final word, doesn’t it?


 c 2021, PL, dba lovepat press, Benton AR 72-19 USA

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