“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
—Wendell Berry (1983)
Poet, novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry died last week, at age 92. Throughout his writings, and in the life he lived, he called us to engage humanity’s problems at a human scale. His message has particular resonance for arts management practitioners at this moment of national and global mayhem.
As Berry warned the 1989 graduates of the College of the Atlantic: “We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale” (Berry 1989, quoted in Willers 1991). Instead, he offered:
“Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence – that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods” (Berry 2010).
To Berry, abstraction was the enemy of meaningful action, since “the large-scale solution to the large-scale problem, which is so dear to governments, universities, and corporations, serves mostly to distract people from the small, private problems that they may, in fact, have the power to solve” (2010).
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Meaningful action will happen in actual places, among actual neighbors, upon actual land. It won’t be grandiose, abstract, or glorious, but “small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous” (Berry 1991).
So, if the noise and nastiness of our national scale leave you wondering what to do or which way to go, perhaps the real work and the real journey are local. Turn your attention, effort, and energy toward making your immediate world more connected, more resilient, and more beautiful.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Governance
Governance involves structuring, sustaining, and overseeing the organization's purposes, resources, and goals (often through boards or trustees).
Framework of the Week: Personal Projects
The Personal Projects framework was developed by psychology scholar Brian R. Little to interrogate the way people understand and organize their actions in the world. He defined personal projects as “extended sets of personally salient action in context.”
Photo by GreenForce Staffing on Unsplash
Sources
Berry, Wendell. 1983. “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms.” In Standing by Words: Essays. San Francisco: North Point Press.
Berry, Wendell. 1989. Commencement address, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME. Quoted in Willers 1991.
Berry, Wendell. 1991. “Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse.” Atlantic, February 1991.
Berry, Wendell. 2010. “Word and Flesh.” In What Are People For? Essays. New York: Catapult. First delivered as a commencement address, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME, 1989; see Berry 1989.
Willers, W. B., ed. 1991. Learning to Listen to the Land. Washington, DC: Island Press.
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