My neighbour is a naturalist. It is his job and his passion. He notices things in our neighbourhood that the rest of us often overlook. When a bird lands in one of the trees surrounding our apartment building, he can tell you exactly what species it is, which season it tends to visit and where it might be building a nest.
A while back, we came upon him stationed in the corridor outside our apartment. He was sitting with his spotting scope pointed to the trees, and he invited me to “look.”
I peered through the scope, and what was hidden came into full view: a coppersmith barbet perched on the rim of a hollow high above, feeding its nesting mate inside. We watched for some time as the barbet flew back and forth from the nest into the surrounding woods, gathering berries for its beloved. If it were not for my neighbour’s trained eye, we would have walked past without a second glance, oblivious to the vibrant and active beauty around us.
Wendell Berry’s work does something similar. His poems, essays, and fiction are essentially one long invitation to his readers to “look.” To pay attention to the people, places, and things given to us.
Since Berry’s recent passing, I have been reflecting on one of his shortest poems, “The Peace of Wild Things.” It has come alive for me in different seasons of life. It raises a question many of us face: Where do you look when fear about your family’s future overwhelms you?
Berry does not give us a cold, disembodied, intellectual answer. Instead, he takes us outdoors into the natural world, where the wild things remind us that we are dependent creatures who have a dependable Father.
The Future We Cannot Control
The poem opens with a familiar scene: a parent lying awake in bed, startled by the slightest sound and filled with fear for themselves and their children’s future.
Berry writes:
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 . . .
The “least sound” could be an external trigger—a sudden cry from the children’s room or rain lashing against the window. But often the sound comes from within. The house is silent, but the heart is not. It is racing. It is sifting through all the unfinished work, replaying the difficult conversations, and imagining worst-case scenarios.
What is this peace? It is the freedom that comes from embracing the creator and creature distinction.
Notice what Berry is describing. He is not responding to an immediate threat. He is reacting to an imagined one. This is what, later in the poem, he calls the “forethought of grief.” It is the sorrow we feel over a loss that has not yet happened and may never come to pass.
The writer of Proverbs says, “Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down” (Prov. 12:25). That is Berry’s experience: the crushing weight of anxiety. But he does not stay in the dark of the night, ruminating over his fears. He goes outdoors.
The Peace We Can Experience
You cannot always think your way out of this kind of fear. When anxiety gets hold of you, brooding over the same worries will not bring relief. So, Berry steps outside his home and into the natural world. He writes:
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.
There, beside the water, his racing heart begins to slow down, and he finds “the peace of wild things.”
What is this peace? It is the freedom that comes from embracing the creator and creature distinction.
The Limits We Need to Embrace
The natural world is not immune to danger. The wood drake is vulnerable to predators. The heron does not have a well-stocked pantry; it must search for food every day. Violent winds and storms can disturb the still waters. Yet these creatures do not live with anxiety about what tomorrow might bring. They live within their creaturely limits and receive each day as it comes.
Like a splash of cold water on the face, watching the wild things shocks Berry out of his illusion of control. Out of the functional belief that it is all on him to hold his life and his family’s future together. He remembers that he is a dependent creature.
In Job’s response to Zophar, Job points to the wild things as witnesses to this very truth that our life is held in the hands of a Sovereign God.
But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you . . .
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind (Job 12:7-10).
Berry ends his poem with these words:
For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The peace creation offers is real, but it is only “for a time.” It is temporary. A walk in your neighbourhood park can calm your anxious fears and even remind you of your creaturely limits, but it cannot give you lasting peace.
The Father Who Cares
Jesus lifts our gaze beyond creation to the Creator in Matthew 6, when he says, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matt. 6:26).
The creator and sustainer of the heron, the wood drake, and the coppersmith barbet is also our Father.
He points us to the wild things but does not stop there. He leads us from creation to the Creator—our heavenly Father who cares for us.
How do we know that this Father will not abandon us when the “forethought of grief” becomes a painful reality? We look to the cross. Paul writes, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32).
The cross does not promise us a life without suffering (1 Pet. 2:21). But it is proof that the Father who gave his only beloved Son for us loves us and will not abandon his children in our grief.
The creator and sustainer of the heron, the wood drake, and the coppersmith barbet is also our Father. We may not know what the future will bring, but we know the one who holds the future is our Father, whom we can depend on (Isa. 41:10).
The next time fear for your family, your work, your health, or your ministry grips your heart, the invitation is to “look.”
Look at the wild things. And then look beyond them to the Father who made them and cares for you.
