Meditations Against Despair 1: "The Peace of Wild Things"

As part of my graduate program in Spirituality at Merrimack College, I’m currently taking a class on Christian Spirituality. For our final project we have to “offer human beings living in the 21st century with the inner resources and the key elements of a spirituality to withstand its dehumanizing stressors and to become fully human persons.” Some of the stressors I identified were: materialism and consumerism, digital distractions and technology overload, fast-paced lifestyles, and disconnection from nature. Perhaps as a result of these, I also identified a looming sense of despair that pervades 21st century humanity.

I initially thought to do a paper analyzing ways to counter these stressors, but the assignment doesn’t require a paper, so then I began to think of some other ways to fulfill this project. As any of you who have read this Substack for awhile know, both reading and writing poetry is a vital spiritual practice in my life. My other vital spiritual practice is immersion in nature. I started consider a way to combine these two practices, and what has emerged is something I’m calling “Meditations Against Despair”. You can listen to the first one above, which is centered around Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things”:

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.

I plan to do a few more of these for my immediate school project, but who knows, maybe I’ll continue the series if there’s enough interest. I hope you’re enriched by what you hear.

P.S. The meditation is best experienced with headphones.

For an audio and visual experience:

For audio only: