What if we were to extend our notions of neighborhood to the nonhuman natural world? We’re familiar with the courtesies and manners appropriate for our human neighbors (whether or not we accept them). But what about the heron, the salamander, the fox, the speckled trout?
I had a wonderful opportunity to meet and hear Wendell Berry — front row, center, why not? — as this year’s recipient of the Martin Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. There he posed this question, which resonates like a cello in my soul. Add countless other earth-wise moments of earthy wisdom in that lovely interview with Norman Wirzba, and I had a full-blown orchestra humming.
I’ve been mulling that observation — that we’ve lost our manners, forgotten the courtesies of living with diverse b
eings on a fragile planet — especially in light of another. Taking issue with one of his earlier poems, a beautiful meditation on the occasional burden of being titled “The Peace of Wild Things,” Berry confessed that he is now uncomfortable with that notion of wildness.
The birds he observed on the water near his home were not the wild ones, he said. “They are carrying on domestic lives.” It is we, Berry observed, who are wild. We are out of control, “have given up our manners and our courtesies.” Now, the thought did cross my mind that the whitetail deer who ate every promising head of my new hydrangeas could exercise a bit more neighborly respect. But then again, with yet another new subdivision in construction down the road, I can’t really blame them. After all, we have taken away their homes and the homes of their predators altogether.
So I’m going to mull on this. In the kitchen moments, polished silver, and cheer of the holidays, I’m going to think on this – that it’s time to relearn the domestic arts of efficiency, beauty, and the deep joy of simple pleasures, that it’s time to relearn good manners in company of all of our neighbors.
