I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
then with the gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.
That is the poem with which Paul Kingsnorth ends his October 2025 Wendell Berry lecture at The Berry Center.
A few things from/on the lecture:
- Mary Berry: “My father has told me all of my life that if you set an intention and make a commitment to something, the help you need will come. … Since starting The Berry Center in 2011, I’ve known this to be true. Tonight, I am happy to say that the right person has come to us, and he has written the right book.”
- Kingsnorth: “And the reason I don’t have a comforting and cohesive answer is that there isn’t one really. And why should there be? Because if we’re going to identify our enemy as a giant, soulless machine, and the alternative as a local, human-scale, creative act of rebellion and rootedness, then we’re not going to arrive at a nice five-point plan for the government to implement, or a new revolutionary theory by which we can abolish techno-feudalism.” What I will add to this is something I have said before and have been saying more often: Sometimes, even often, it is enough for humans to know what to say no to, because the imago-Dei-scaled soul remains. As Kingsnorth says a bit later, “I am optimistic about the fact that people wish to remain human, and I think that’s what’s going to save us. … Because the good thing about human-scale work is that it is human-scale.” But of course, we have to actually say no.
- For the Kurt Vonnegut “envelope story” Kingsnorth tells, here’s a short CBS transcript of the original where I believe it first appeared.
- There is, in the poem above, a hint at the cards I have not yet shown — that is, my own hesitancy or caution regarding Kingsnorth and the Machine and all that. The bulk of that caution is basically covered in an unpublished (unposted?) essay last year, but it had nothing to do with Kingsnorth and was written before his book crossed my radar or was even published.
- But… the boy wakes and there are thoughts left for another time.