Have you ever sat quietly in a garden and noticed how the birds simply exist? They don't spend their mornings worrying about the coming winter or mourning the loss of a fallen leaf. Wendell Berry’s beautiful words remind us that there is a profound, untouched peace found in the natural world, a peace that comes from living entirely in the present moment without the heavy burden of predicting future sorrows. When we look at the wild things, we see a way of being that is untaxed by the mental exhaustion of 'what ifs.'
In our human lives, it is so easy to let our minds wander into the shadows of the future. We tend to build elaborate structures of anxiety, trying to prepare ourselves for grief before it even arrives. We call it being prepared, but often, it is just a way of suffering twice—once in our imagination and once in reality. We carry a heavy backpack of imagined tragedies, making our current moment feel much more difficult than it actually needs to be. It is a heavy weight that many of us have forgotten we are even wearing.
I remember a time when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed by a big change in my life. I spent weeks lying awake, playing out every possible way things could go wrong. I was mourning losses that hadn't even happened yet. One afternoon, I sat by a small pond and watched a tiny turtle sunning itself on a log. That little turtle wasn't calculating the risks of the weather or worrying about the next season; it was just feeling the warmth of the sun. In that moment, I felt a tiny spark of that wild peace enter my own heart, reminding me that the sun was still shining right here, right now.
We cannot completely escape our human capacity for thought, but we can learn to visit that state of wild peace more often. We can practice setting down our heavy thoughts, even if just for a few minutes a day, to simply breathe and exist alongside the trees and the wind. It is okay to let go of the need to solve every future problem for a little while.
Today, I want to encourage you to find your own 'wild thing' moment. Perhaps it is watching the clouds drift by or feeling the texture of a leaf. When you find yourself spiraling into forethought of grief, gently remind yourself that you are safe in this moment, and try to let that natural peace flow back to you.