Sabbath Poem | #83

There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.

- Wendell Berry, from This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

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We’re keeping it simple today. Despite being the queen of “poetry is not difficult!” sometimes my brain doesn’t want to parse anything complicated. These are the times for Wendell Berry.

Tight poems like these are packages of profundity. They fit in your palm, like a zen koan, but without the mind-bendy paradoxes. Try reading this one out loud, and listen to the easy rhyme of day and way. Their repetition throughout the poem makes the word place, when it arrives, feel like a homecoming.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the idea of texture as a fundamental quality of life. Being alive feels like something, just as it feels like something to run your hand over a wooden table or grassy lawn. The sensory quality of living is a constant hum underscoring our experience.

I’m trying to make some substantive decisions right now about my professional (and therefore personal) future, and I’m finding my mind tangled in possibilities. What can I excel at? How can I make the world better and not worse? How can I possibly prioritize work, creativity, relationships, family? etc. The only question that doesn’t overwhelm me with unknowns is this: what could life feel like?

This isn’t exactly a more answerable question, but it’s digestible right now. I don’t feel strongly about my job title or industry (who knows what jobs will even exist in a couple years?). I no longer feel confident about what “doing good” looks like or how I am suited to contribute. The future is increasingly in free-fall and almost nothing can truly be known save that every day I am lucky enough to still be here will feel like something.

Of course, what life feels like won’t always be in my control either. But it’s because I don’t have the final say, because of my experience with chronic illness and mental health challenges, because of an erratic economy, a roiling planet, and mercurial country, that I find myself fixating on texture over touchstones. The only thing to be certain of is that no matter what happens tomorrow, I am experiencing today.

Reading Berry’s poem, I’m puzzled by the first line: “there is a day.” I can’t decide whether to read it as the promise of future wisdom — at some point, you will realize this is true — or as a comment on ephemerality — on a particular day this is so, but not all days. I’m choosing to read it as both. Perhaps one day it will be easy to let go of the future and I can be content that “the way” is the place I’m meant to be. For now, contentment ebbs and flows. I think and worry and plan and fret and only on occasion pause to notice the texture of this life. But I will keep reminding myself, and I will keep reading this poem.

A place,

Jess