How to be alive
The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cézanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he’s alive
forever, this instant, and may be.
~Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths 2001, poem VI”
I’m not sure when I was first introduced to Wendell Berry—I know I’ve read his poems before—but I got into his essays about a year ago. Brooke noticed and gave me a book of his poems for my birthday, which is where I found this treasure.
It stings.
I’m forty-three, but I think I’m still sixteen until trying something unusual. Like jumping for an hour at a trampoline park, which is where I’m taking the kids and a friend this afternoon. If I jumped at a trampoline park for an hour straight, my core—primarily the muscles running lengthwise up my spine—would spend the next week yelling at me like piano strings wound too tightly and out of tune. It happened the last time I played volleyball. No injury. Just muscles that haven’t been used as intensely for two decades. I couldn’t sit comfortably for days.
And I even exercise daily. I like to think I’m fit, but it seems that what I like to think of myself is purely optimistic.
So, what does it mean to be alive? I’ve spent the last couple of days reading through this part of Berry’s Given and haven’t come up with anything. Perhaps that’s the reason why the poem really stings. It’s not the feelings springing from the line “now that I am old” but rather the awareness that I can’t answer what it means to be alive. Oh, I can spiritualize this question with the best of them, but I’m exhausted from pretending to know what I don’t. Slap a Bible verse on it and prance on with life. People’s faces mouthing John 14.6 or something equivalent rise to my mind, but they don’t appear to know any more than I do. Far too often spirituality is a cover for ignorance.
What does it mean to be alive?
Berry’s vulnerability with this question invites me to make it my own. He’s a Christian, and a Christian pacifist at that. Is it ironic that a poet who is more willing to be killed than to kill is asking what it means to be alive?
No. I don’t think so. I suspect that a “kill or be killed” or “stay alive at all costs” mentality is sidetracked—distracted from living by the fear of dying. Peter exemplifies the power of distraction that fear creates: he forgets he is walking on the water because the winds and waves look scary.
“The glory of God is [creation] fully alive.” (St. Irenaeus of Lyons)
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash.
Berry turns to nature, which is not surprising. He advocates for sustainable farming and conservation—he still farms with horses. His first two images are difficult for me to connect with. I’ve seen “worn hills” and Cézanne’s works, but something about the “mere singing wren” makes a deeper impression on me. The wren does what he was created to do: he sings. In the timelessness of the now he sings—“forever, this instant.”
A thought rises from something I heard on a podcast recently. John O’ Donohue is talking with Krista Tippett and quotes Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive . . .” and I can’t help but think that “this mere singing wren” qualifies. Perhaps Irenaeus could be slightly amended—expanded, I dare—to “The glory of God is creation fully alive.” If this bird embodies Irenaeus’ wisdom, perhaps I too can make sense of what it means to be alive.
I am the wren, and this post is my song.
