Remembering Wendell Berry

8/31/2026

It's admittedly odd to have a mid-life crisis at 19, but there I was, living alone on my grandparent's farm having left college midway through my sophomore year. I didn't have much of a plan beyond working and reading, but I knew I wanted something more than what it felt like school offered at the time. Before leaving Georgetown, I went to some of my professors and asked for a reading list, and Georgetown being a small, liberal arts college in Central Kentucky, the works of Wendell Berry were highly represented. Reading his books there on the back porch is still one of my favorite memories.

I loved that house. My grandfather died when I was young, and my grandmother moved to town a few years before my return. She graciously agreed to let me live in the farmhouse rent free during my "sabbatical" as I pretentiously called it. There was no air-conditioning, which was absolutely miserable, but I was too stubborn and proud to get a window unit. Did Thoreau have window unit at Walden Pond, damnit!? Sure he lived in the upper, northeast instead of the sweltering armpit that is the Ohio River Valley, but still. While it made the home uninhabitable during the day, the evenings were magical. As the sun set, I'd open all the windows to cool the house and go on the screened-in back porch to read, while the crickets and the frogs did their best to keep me awake.

I have come to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. And when I think about it, it can seem strange beyond telling that this particular bunch of us should be here on this little patch of ground in this little patch of time, and I can think of other times and places I might have lived, other kinds of man I might have been. But there is something else. There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, with one another and with the place and all the living things.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Outside the Bible, the words of Wendell Berry generally, and the quote above from Jayber Crow specifically, are probably the writings that had the biggest impact on my life. You won't find any better descriptions of true community than Berry's novels, essays, and poetry. His ideas on vocation and membership have been a guiding light and call home for me on more than one occasion, persisting despite my worldly resistance at times.

Even though I have never harnessed a mule team, and I wouldn't know a donkey from a hole in the ground, I always felt like his books just made sense naturally. They are like driving on the back roads where you grew up...you don't need any help navigating. I loved the authentic descriptions of small communities that could have just as easily been the Cecilia or Sonora of my youth. I loved how he could weave between his earnest belief in the value of agrarian life while recognizing the fallibilities and absurdities of the characters found in Port William. I loved the contrariness of the Mad Farmer poems which rest in the tension between cheap labels, where someone can be fiercely independent while at the same time completely submit themselves to the ones around them. And I love that in a world determined to strip everything down to mere transactionalism, he showed what true economy actually looks like.

Sitting on that back, porch I'd read his books and listen to music well into the night, worrying, as many teenagers do, about what I would do and who I would become. I'd like to say I've completely outgrown the immature, selfish thinking of my youth, but I'd be lying if I said I did. However, twenty-some-odd years later, like Jayber, I have now gotten to the age where I know for better or worse my life is woven together here with these people in this place. I hope our little store makes it for the better, and that it might be a place where a new generation can find the timeless words of Wendell Berry for themselves.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't."