Sabbaths 1993 I by Wendell Berry

Sabbaths 1993 I
by Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back. 
Less and less you are 
that possibility you were. 
More and more you have become 
those lives and deaths 
that have belonged to you. 
You have become a sort of grave 
containing much that was 
and is no more in time, beloved 
then, now, and always. 
And so you have become a sort of tree 
standing over a grave. 
Now more than ever you can be 
generous toward each day 
that comes, young, to disappear 
forever, and yet remain 
unaging in the mind. 
Every day you have less reason 
not to give yourself away.

---

He was in his late 50s when he wrote this, the 50s being a threshold I’ve just crossed and I’ve been thinking of what lies behind me and what lies before me — still so much horizon, and the last line really lands. With each day, I have less reason to not give the entirety of who I am away, that more generosity of self is available as more of those lives and deaths that were mine and were beloved are already in the grave as I keep growing towards the sky.

Sabbaths 1993 I is from Wendell Berry's A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997 (Counterpoint, 1998), the gathered volume of his Sunday-walking meditations on his Kentucky farm.