We’ve lost a handful of visionary writers in recent months and years: Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard come to mind for me, among others. These are people who not only inspired me as a writer in my formative years but who also shaped my moral imagination. In each case, learning about their deaths was like watching a giant redwood crack and list and crash into the forest below. Something regal and ancient disappeared from the skyline.
These writers were unafraid to be close to things I also longed to be close to: the natural world, the rich loam of a quiet inner life, Mystery itself.
I understand why it’s a little silly to feel like I knew them, or to experience their loss as personal somehow, but their writing offered an intimacy that felt like kinship. They were unafraid to be close to things I also longed to be close to: the natural world, the rich loam of a quiet inner life, Mystery itself.
When I read them, huddled under pooled lamplight in my dorm room bed, I was both witnessing and learning about what arises when we give our whole selves over to simply noticing and loving the world. I was responding to the writing, yes. But ultimately my response was much more visceral. It happened long before I even clocked the craft—the shimmering language, the rhythm, a wise insight, or a brilliant turn of phrase.
