Greetings from the Porch,

The news of Wendell Berry’s death this week has hit Porchers hard. We’ll be running tributes to him in the days to come, but obviously words cannot articulate all that he has given to so many people. I’m sure the conference next month in Indianapolis will include many conversations in which grief and gratitude mingle. If you'd like to share your own tribute to how reading Berry--or interacting with him--shaped your life, please do so here.

• In this week's Water Dipper I mostly recommend essays responding to Wendell Berry, along with a few others.

• Samuel Heard describes how Wendell Berry speaks to a suburban Zoomer: "Rare is the writer who changes a person’s mind; Berry is the kind of writer who changes what one pays attention to."

• Paul Pastor testifies to how reading and corresponding with Berry helped him learn to inhabit the tension between the ideal and the real: "Wendell is that American thinker who, for me, represents the true wisdom of a sacred and infuriating intersection: the crossroads where Real and Ideal meet."

• I share how Berry lived and wrote as a man in love with good things: "In the last letter that Berry wrote to me, he signed off, 'Even in so bad a time we have much to be thankful for.' Indeed. May our sorrow and even despair at the loss of this wonderful writer and friend be a magnanimous despair, granting us a deeper realization of the inestimable gift that his life and work have been."

• Jason Peters reviews Bill Kauffman's new book: "I cannot imagine a true localist anywhere—not even a hayseed-and-hookworm tourist walking through Times Square (albeit with his head over his shoulder, nervous as a whore in church, as out of place as bacon at a bar mitzvah)—I cannot imagine anyone not relishing this book, except maybe all those journalistic hacks and their fawning followers who believe, who actually honest-to-God-believe, that red and blue are the only two colors reality puts on offer."

• Matt Rigney praises whimsy: "Let whimsy back into your life. When you do, you may find that joy comes along with it."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about Dolly Parton this week.

There are many of Wendell Berry's poems that are being read and shared this week. And this is a fitting way to honor and remember him. I keep returning to this 2001 Sabbath poem that my friend Eric Miller sent to me:

The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cezanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he's alive
forever, this instant, and may be.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro