The Art of Being Here.

The art of being here

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written, and it is good to get back to this with the inspiration of a poem by Wendell Berry.   Wendell was a farmer in Kentucky for most of his life and has written both poetry and prose over many years often reflecting on the importance of the local and the ordinary.   He has a wonderful and passionate gift of noticing things and bringing them to our attention.   As a farmer he is big on respecting the ‘local conditions’ and of not importing into these our schemes and mechanised plans and processes which ride roughshod over the uniqueness of this particular patch of God’s earth.   As a church minister I resonate with much of what he writes and often just replace the word farm with church or community.   Just as the local soil profile, temperature patterns, rainfall averages, wind direction, ground cover all determine what will work or will not work on a farm so it is with a church and local community.  A two way dialogue is needed between our ideas and plans and the ‘local conditions’.  Out of this can grow for all of us the art of being here.

Here are a few lines from Berry’s poem ‘History’ from his anthology ‘The Peace of Wild Things’:


Here I have made the beginning 
of a farm intended to become 
my art of being here.
By it I would instruct 
my wants: they should belong
to each other and to this place.
Until my song comes here
to learn its words, my art 
is but the hope of song.



I have in mind a conversation with two young dads recently when we were discussing the fact that with young children and committed mortgages this is now the place for them, they will be unlikely to leave this town and after years of moving around are finally putting down roots.   They hope their families will thrive here and they want to help build a community that will enable such flourishing.  This is their art of being here.   Like all art though we have to work with the material we are given. Berry reminds us that ‘by it I would instruct my wants’.  I love this line, and its reminder that what we want in life needs to be shaped and guided by local conditions so that   our wants should belong to each other and to this place.

A coherent and ordered life is the result of lining up our desires and wants with a conscious and intentional set of principles and a vision for our life.  In this way our various wants belong together and to some extent that is a lifelong project.  The beauty of what Berry adds though is that such a belonging together includes and to this place.    The local context of our lives is not just a stage on which we live them out, but actually form an essential part of what we are becoming.   

I pray this will be true for these young Dads, that they will celebrate being in this place as they raise their children, love their wives, fulfil their vocations, keep the show on the road.  That they will pay attention to the local conditions of their surroundings, the unique character of each child, of the changing nature of their marriage as their love matures, as wider events ebb and flow and as the community around them changes in response to these.   For myself in the early years of my ministry here I am called to have my wants instructed by the wonderful realities and quirkiness of the congregation so that my art of serving here also belongs to this place.

As Berry reminds us however, our song will only find its words once it has come here to this place, to learn from these local conditions.  Our song is not something purely personal which we offer the world and neither is our song the end of some private quest for self-expression and fulfilment. Rather our song is in some way given to us, discovered by us as we experiment with the art of living in the place we are set and the people we are surrounded by, shaped by what happens to us and how we respond to them. The art of being here is a shared life.