Sarah Morgan
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.
This perfect Wendell Berry poem came to me through the ever-awesome Patti Digh. And then I read about a study that showed people can better learn after walking in the woods than after walking a busy street.
Is it better for your brain to live outside a city? I’m neither a neurologist nor a sociologist. I don’t know. But I know that the further I get, the better mine seems.
