When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
I moved to Minnesota the summer after graduating from undergrad and getting engaged, and I never anticipated how beautiful and difficult it would be. I was 21, and the longest I’d spent away from Kentucky was four months while I studied abroad. But here I was, leaving all my friends and family behind to move twelve hours away to some northern state with which my only familiarity came from Marshall Erickson in How I Met Your Mother.
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