I love this poem. It’s simplicity, honesty and hope. It’s about finding solace in nature to combat despair, anxiety, and fear for the future. It highlights the contrast between human overthinking and the instinctive, present-focused existence of wild creatures, encouraging a return to the natural world to find rest, grace, and freedom. It’s now included in the growing Recovery Poems Section of this website.
In our February 2026 Emotional Sobriety Series, we discussed how the power of pause can help us discover how ‘the best in me can lead the rest in me’. We discussed how this ‘best in me’ discloses itself when I can find a ‘position of neutrality’ which has no agenda to produce some desired outcome. This poem helps find me this ‘position of neutrality’. The Big Book on pages 84/85 describes it this way:
“Love and tolerance of others is our code. And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone – even alcohol. For by this time sanity will have returned … We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality – safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is our experience. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition. It is easy to let up on the spiritual program of action and rest on our laurels. We are headed for trouble if we do, for alcohol is a subtle foe. We are not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.”
Wendell Berry is an American writer. The author of more than 40 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, he has been a farmer and environmental activist throughout his adult life, with stints in between as a university professor. The recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellowships, Wendell is the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. He lives and works with his wife on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. – Bruce M.
The Peace of Wild Things
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.