Territories of our Time

Dear Friends,

When I learned of the poet Wendell Berry’s death last week, I felt our wonky world lurch further out of kilter, and a pang of something like despair. Again, it hardly seemed possible that a life so firmly rooted in our earth, so attuned to its rhythms and cries through steadfast artistic and agrarian practices, could ever lose its physicality—let alone at a time when threats to ecological well-being so readily invite despair. Of course, like many, I returned to Berry’s poems. I then turned back to a collection of his essays titled “What Are People For?” A dear friend had pointed me to it a few months ago. In “Writer and Region,” Berry decries the “many kinds of Territories to escape to”—figurative places to which we remove ourselves in order to escape or willfully ignore our responsibilities toward our home places and communities, toward humanity in its home. He tours the reader through several such Territories, looking briefly but starkly at each, before arriving at the Territory that had galvanized my friend:

Then there is the Territory of despair, where it is assumed that what is objectionable is “inevitable,” and so again the essential work is neglected. How can we have something better if we do not imagine it? How can we imagine it if we do not hope for it? How can we hope for it if we do not attempt to realize it?

This essential work was Wendell Berry’s. He faced the objectionable, imagined something different, and enacted it.

The news of Berry’s death reached me here in Peʻahi at a time when I had been thinking anew about legacy. Next year will mark 100 years since William’s birth, 50 since he planted the first tree here in what has become the palm forest, and seven since the Conservancy began to carry forward his legacy through our stewardship. As the tide of William and Paula’s shared life here slowly recedes, I am struck by a turn in my thinking from the legacy of those who have taken up the essential work—William and Paula, Wendell Berry, among many—to the lineage of their practice of care. In an ongoing and collective commitment, stewarded by the voices and actions of those who precede and follow them, their lives become temporal and physical nodes, essential to the ongoing work of tending our world. It is here at these generative nodes where The Merwin Conservancy and The Berry Center seek not only to continue, but to magnify the impact of these beautiful lives through collective stewardship of place, and application and evolution of practice—and poetry.

Here at the crosscurrents of what was when William and Paula lived here, and what will be in the years ahead, the philosophical and the practical are one and the same when it comes to restoration, repair, and replacement. As you’ll see below, the newly rebuilt shade shelves, where for decades William raised baby palms to plant out in the garden, tell this story. With great thanks to a small group of donors, we have refurbished this storied structure following William’s simple design and aesthetic, while moving the shelves a few feet into the mingled shadows of a much changed canopy.

The footbridge, which holds so many stories, is itself succumbing to the passage of time and the tropical elements. The stream bed over which it crosses is dry, and has been since its diversion in the mid 19th century—except after a very heavy rain, and even then, it only fleetingly flows. William’s “One Valley” speaks of his futile search for the stream’s headwaters, and of “the silence that I hear now / day and night on its way to the sea.” He built the small bridge clearly not to keep from getting wet, and not even because the stream bed is deep or tricky to negotiate. The poem’s first stanza hints at the reason: William’s rust-colored chow chow Muku, who loved to follow him in the garden and up the stream bed. Where once “she ran straight up the stone / like an unmoored flame,” she began to stumble, having lost her eyesight ten years before William lost his. The bridge meant Muku could stay close, and cross safely.

Since we became the stewards of the garden, we have paused on this footbridge many times to read “One Valley” to our visitors, and to share stories of this place from recent and distant chapters. As we make plans to mindfully expand our onsite programs in the months and years ahead, all the while safeguarding the intimacy of this place and the safety of our visitors, we hope to gather on Muku’s bridge well into the future. This month, we’ll begin its restoration. If you’d like to be part of this project, we would of course welcome and appreciate your support. You’ll find details below, where you’ll also find recent poet-in-residence Noʻu Revilla’s gorgeous reading of “One Valley.”

I am reminded of this story about a radius of care—the distance William could hand carry two buckets of water, to tend newly planted palms. It’s a metric of inherently human scale, and also of physical effort—and investment of energy on behalf of one’s convictions. Revisiting this story as I consider legacy and lineage, I am inspired anew to carry buckets as far as I am able. Again and again until change comes about.

Me ke aloha,

Sonnet