To Love a Place: A Tribute to the Wisdom and Words of Wendell Berry

“Oh yes, brothers and sisters, we are members one of another. The difference, beloved, ain’t in who is and who’s not, but in who knows it and who don’t. Oh, my friends, there ain’t no nonmembers, living nor dead nor yet to come. Do you know it? Or do you don’t? A man is a member of a woman and a worm. A woman is a member of a man and a mole. Oh, beloved, it’s all one piece of work.”

These are the words of Burley Coulter, a mischievous, tender, and faithful old man who spent his life farming the soil of rural Kentucky. But in the truest sense, these are the words and their meaning the legacy of Wendell Berry, who penned Burley’s character and many others, and who died on August 31st of this year at 92 years old. 

Wendell Berry, himself a lifelong Kentucky farmer, was an author, poet, and essayist extraordinaire. His published work, which spanned seven decades, explored the created world, us created people, and how best to care for both. Many of his novels and short stories were set in the fictional town of Port William, based on his own home of Port Royal in rural Henry County, Kentucky. These stories detail several generations of this community and are interwoven such that the reader meets the same characters across multiple books and grows fond of these precious lives. We meet folks like the gentle and generous Jayber Crow, the strong and steadfast Margaret Feltner, and, of course, the beloved Burley Coulter. Berry describes them with the insight and precision of one who has really witnessed that which he writes about, and it is no surprise that many of the places and people in his books are based on his own land and neighbors. Central to Berry’s work is his unshakable belief in the connectedness of a place and its people and his conviction that we live best in community.

Among the Port William novels, there is no better example of this than Hannah Coulter. This is the story of the life of Hannah Coulter, recounted by her as an old woman. It is, as she says, her “giving of thanks.” She had three children and two marriages, the first to Virgil cut tragically short almost as soon as it began by the battlefields of World War II, and the second to Nathan long and beautiful, slow and sweet. Hannah farmed, cooked, celebrated, wept, befriended, and farewelled. She rocked her babies, tended to her grandchildren, and revelled in the quiet peace of her wooded home and her favorite walking path around the hillside and down to a laughing, tumbling stream. She lived through the Great Depression, a World War, the loss of friends’ children, and the distance from her own when they were grown. This is her own story, but she did not bear it alone. In Port William, no grief was forgotten nor gift unloved, but everything was known and carried along by the steady love of neighbors, family, and friends. They all, as Nathan always said, just “lived right on.” The ordinary life is sufficient, and it is made extraordinary by simple habits of love: outstretched arms, warm smiles, and soft light from open doors. In every one of his novels about Port William, Berry returns to this: we find our meaning in the simple truth that we are creatures made by God and for each other. We find everything we need in the soil we till and the people with whom we till it, and every moment of it is a gift from the One who made us. 

Perhaps these truths strike me particularly through the story of Hannah, because, fictional though she may be, I see myself in her. As a young woman, she is concerned with the same things I am: marriage, children, livelihood, and community. I then watch her grow older, get married, have children, and settle down, and I listen carefully to her words, because the dreams she achieved are mine, too. Shortly after she marries Nathan, she describes the joyous feeling of setting up their new home, remarking that “[e]verything we did seemed to start something that was going to go on and on.” I read this not as a newlywed but as a young woman like she once was, and I ask myself: What shall I set up in my life that I want to let go on and on? 

Berry is well known for his captivating world of Port William, but he wrote beautifully about the real world as well. He practiced what he preached: he deeply loved this world, but he worried for it. In 1994, Berry gave a speech in Louisville, Kentucky titled “Health is Membership,” and its message is profound. In this essay, Wendell Berry argues that “health is wholeness” and that “[t]he community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health.” In other words, to understand what it means to be well, we must pay attention to a person’s story, experiences, relationships, and place, not just their body. Berry understood well that ofttimes our places of healing (hospitals, clinics, etc.) take people away from their usual place and into a sterile and unfamiliar environment undergirded by systems more concerned with symptoms and insurance than stories and relationships. If we are to truly seek “healing,” we must widen our focus to the wholeness of a person: the communal nature of each individual.

This summer, I trained to be an EMT. As part of my program, I completed four days of clinical training both in an emergency room and on an ambulance. I learned a tremendous amount during those four shifts, but one thing was particularly striking: EMS providers, unlike most any other health care professional in the traditional model, have the unique opportunity to witness and work in a person’s place. Not every 911 call comes from the patient’s home, but many do, and the vast majority come at least from somewhere in the patient’s community. An EMS provider steps out of their ambulance into their patient’s place. They might know the flowery smell of their patient’s home, notice the stains on their faded quilt, sift through an overflowing medicine cabinet to find the necessary prescriptions, soothe fretting bystanders. They carry their patient out of their place, and eventually turn them over to hospital providers who will very likely never see their patients’ homes themselves. One day, I hope to be a hospital worker. But Berry’s words reflected in the work of EMS are things I hope always inform my patient care. Even when my job may be such that I no longer directly witness my patients’ communities or places, I want to learn their stories. I want to avoid reducing my patients to only their bodies or their signs and symptoms. I want them to feel belonging, even in strange, white-walled rooms lined with gloves and beeping monitors and sharps boxes. I want to take seriously, as Berry does, the idea that healing only comes when we remember the wholeness of who we are. 

Wendell Berry invites us to pay attention. He draws us out of our world of hurry and efficiency, and puts us into one focused on presence. He calls us to love the place we are in, and to really know and cherish its people. To remember, like Burley, that “it’s all one piece of work.” And like Hannah, to look back, to recount our own giving of thanks, and to offer it to our God who made every place and called it good. 

We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.

—Wendell Berry, “Sabbath 1999 VI” (1999)