This Place that You Belong To

Extract from a Sabbath poem by Wendell Berry:

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end. …

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
From the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
By which it speaks for itself and no other.

2007, Poem VI

Gratefuls:
- taking time to go look at the dam; after all the rain we've had, thought it might be overflowing, but not yet
- banks of wild lavender, deep purple in the low light
- broad beans from Maria's garden, with homemade chorizo

Can you see the heron to the left of the tall pipe in the middle of the photo? Plenty of fish in the water below it.