Gifts of circumstance

From the 1977 essay "Healing" by Wendell Berry, from the collection "What are People For?", via Sally Oviatt:

           

IV

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health.  It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hand of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

V

And by it we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible.  One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.  The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.

VI

And there is no escaping that return.

From the order of nature we return to the order – and the disorder – of humanity.

From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.

One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness.  For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.

In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.