On this Thanksgiving Day, 2017, I wish you good food, friends and family; gratitude and grace; and “The Peace of Wild Things,” a poem by Wendell Berry, taken from One Hundred Graces. My husband always reads a selection from this collection at the start of each holiday meal that our family is blessed to share together.

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 my 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.

* One Hundred Graces, as selected by Marcia and Jack Kelly (Bell Tower: New York, 1992)