Those Who Take Care of Us

by Jillian Moore

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I like outside better than inside. I like coming home and going for a little walk to see the sun setting and the trees changing. I like driving to my hometown and watching the landscape change into the flattest earth you’ve ever seen–the whole sky visible. It’s easier to make sense of the world when you’re outside, experiencing all the delights that never ask for anything. 

For me, it’s the frogs I used to catch by my house, it’s the way the sky looks completely different almost every evening depending on the way the clouds litter the horizon, it’s the weather that we don’t get to decide. It reminds me that I’m not in control. This glorious Earth and all the ways she decides to move and change and usher us around in our lives–God, in other words, is in control. That’s a real comfort to me. I dream of a day when we can let her be. No more poison, no more dumping, no more jurisdiction over the earth for our own ends. It’s not ours. We get to be here. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer says “In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.” Care. Comfort. I love it here. We are taken care of, comforted by this earth. Wide, glassy rivers, green hills for miles, the part where the earth and sky meet, the heat resilient okra from the garden, oak trees bigger than you could dream, mountains that make me dizzy, stick bugs, tiny hummingbirds… all perfect antidotes to grief, pain, and fear. 

When despair for the world 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 with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

– Wendell Berry