From the Soil to the Stars: Reflections on Wendell Berry From His Penpal

From the author: On August 31, 2026, three days after I submitted the essay below to The Baylor Line, Wendell Berry died. The news reached me that evening as something I had anticipated and yet was unprepared to receive. For a moment, it seemed as though some great light had gone out of the world, that there was less hope in it without him. Then I realized that Wendell was still in the world. His words remain. His questions remain. The direction he offered remains. 

Earlier that evening, before I heard the news, I had been wrestling with a significant decision in my own life, and I found myself returning again to Wendell’s philosophy and to the letters he had written to me. I imagine it will not be the last time. A man does not cease to be a guide simply because he has gone home.

My heart and prayers go out to the entire Berry family, and most especially to Tanya — his beloved wife and companion of 70 years, who knew better than anyone else what it means to be faithful to a person and a place.

By noon, I had stopped counting how many times the plow tried to pull itself free from my hands.

It was early March, and a soft rain settled over the fields at Homestead Heritage just outside of Waco. A team of draft horses moved steadily through the wet ground while I followed behind, both hands wrapped around the handles of a walking plow. The earth corrected my expectations almost immediately. Every buried root traveled up through the steel and into my arms. If I leaned too heavily to one side, the blade wandered. Too lightly, and it climbed toward the surface. The horses seemed to understand the work far better than I did, moving with the patience of animals long accustomed to human incompetence. 

It took most of a day to plow a single acre. Four of us took turns with the plow, stopping often to stand together and chat in the field and breathe the smell of turned earth. It felt like brushing against a world we had almost entirely forgotten.

Somewhere behind the horses, I thought of the agrarian writer Wendell Berry.

For the better part of the previous year, Berry and I had been exchanging letters about faith, land, community, and the question that seemed to gather all the others into itself. How ought a person live responsibly in the modern world? 

The correspondence had begun to change me in ways I had not anticipated. My daughters were preparing to raise chickens, and we were researching how to establish an apiary. We talked about orchards and animals, about growing and hunting more of what we ate. And I had developed the improbable desire to learn to plow with horses, partly because Berry had written so compellingly about the intimacy between good work and the place upon which that work is done.

What stayed with me after that March day was not nostalgia for some vanished agricultural past. It was something quieter, something I had been encountering again and again in Berry’s letters. It was the idea that care requires proximity.

The acre demanded something of me precisely because I could not deal with it abstractly. I had to walk it. I had to feel where the ground resisted. Progress came at 3 mph, and the measure of success was not how quickly I could escape the limits of place but how well I could work within them. And for the first time, I began to wonder whether the great moral question of our technological age might not be how far human beings can go, but whether we can learn to care for what is already within our reach.

I had first written to Berry as a reader from the comfortable distance at which ideas remain ideas. His books had been troubling that distance for some time, arguing that the way we treat the natural world cannot be separated from the way we treat one another. A culture willing to exhaust its soil or regard animals merely as units of production should not be surprised when those same habits of exploitation appear in its treatment of human beings. Greed does not observe the boundaries we draw between environmental and social problems.

Land was not an abstraction in my own family. I grew up with two Texas ranches in the background of my childhood. My paternal grandfather sold one when he retired. The other ranch was taken through eminent domain to build a toll road outside of Austin. A landscape can be assigned a price without its value ever becoming calculable.

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Berry’s writing caused me to think not only about the land my family had lost, but about the land we possessed in the first place. The history, like any land ownership on our continent, is morally untidy. The government had taken the land from us, but generations earlier, settlers had taken land from Native people. The difference, of course, is that my family received compensation for what was taken.

It is difficult to think seriously about stewardship without eventually encountering inheritance. And it’s difficult to think seriously about inheritance without asking what, exactly, we believe we have inherited. Property? Memory? A right? A debt? Environmental concern is easier when the guilty parties remain conveniently far away — corporations, governments, industries, previous generations. Stewardship becomes more demanding when the pronoun shifts from they to I. What have I neglected? What has been placed within my care?

Slowly I was becoming less interested in environmentalism as a set of positions and more interested in something deeper in Berry’s thought, which was the moral discipline that makes sustained care possible. I began to think that the most fitting word for it was fidelity.

The word can sound almost antique now. It belongs to vows and covenants, to promises made in a vocabulary more comfortable with permanence than ours tends to be. But the longer I read Berry, the more I began to see fidelity as something larger — not merely the keeping of a promise to another person, but a way of inhabiting the world.

Berry spent most of his adult life testing that proposition. He returned to his native Kentucky, settled on a farm in Henry County, and made one small region the imaginative geography of a lifetime’s work. The habits required to care well for a marriage and a farm, he suggested, share something essential: patience, restraint, memory, forgiveness, attention, and the willingness to keep returning after novelty has worn away. Land must be courted long enough to become known. Care becomes particular. This ewe. This hive. This field. Responsibility acquires names.

That particularity matters because nature is an abstraction, and abstractions are remarkably easy to love. I can profess concern for the environment without knowing the name of a single native grass growing beyond my fence. I can lament the destruction of distant ecosystems while treating the small patch of earth entrusted to me as merely decorative. Berry’s challenge is to bring love down to scale. 

For a person of faith, this carries additional weight. A steward does not create the thing he tends. He receives it. To receive something as gift is to recognize a giver, and therefore an obligation beyond appetite. What are we willing to remain faithful to long enough for our care to matter? You cannot nurture what you have already decided is disposable.

I had thought much about the argument for leaving Earth long before I had fully considered the moral importance of staying.

For several years, my family and I lived on a ranch outside of McGregor, Texas, not far from the SpaceX rocket-development facility. Most days followed the ordinary rhythms of rural life with horses and cattle in the pastures, long walks through fields and groves, endless stars at night, and a quiet rarely granted in the modern world. Then, without warning, a rocket engine would ignite. The windows rattled. The ground trembled. The horses raised their heads from the grass. 

Long before I began corresponding with Berry, I had been drawn to that vision myself in my own science-fiction writing and also in writing a graduate thesis on humanity’s potential obligation to expand human consciousness beyond Earth. The argument is not frivolous. Earth is vulnerable, and there is something moving in the thought of carrying the flame of conscious life beyond the world on which it first appeared.

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Even now, Berry’s letters have not taught me to stop looking at the stars. They have changed the questions I ask when I look at them.

The question Berry’s work presses upon the dream of Mars and further space colonization is not whether exploration is wrong. The harder question is what kind of creatures we will be when we arrive. We do not leave our character behind when we leave a place. If our habits on Earth are habits of extraction and abandonment, distance will not purify them. A rocket can carry human beings to another world, but it cannot make us worthy inhabitants of one. The danger lies in acquiring the technological power to leave before acquiring the moral discipline to tend the world already within our hands. 

The stars may indeed be part of our future. But the first test of that future is still beneath our feet.

The trouble with thinking at the scale of planets is that it can make an acre seem very small. An acre will not solve climate change. A hive of bees will not restore a damaged watershed. Yet one of the deepest lessons I have taken from my correspondence with Berry is a growing suspicion of any vision of responsibility so vast that it excuses us from attending to the life immediately within our care.

Nurture happens at the smaller scale. It happens when an animal needs feeding whether or not we feel like feeding it. It happens when a fruit tree is planted with the knowledge that years may pass before anyone eats from it. None of these acts is heroic. Most will never be noticed beyond the small circle of lives that depend upon them. Perhaps that is part of their virtue.

I want my children to inherit not the illusion of a purer past, but a habit of attention — to know that eggs come from particular hens, that soil is not dirt but a living inheritance, that a tree planted now may offer shade to someone whose name we do not yet know. 

Faith has given me a language for this that environmentalism alone never quite did. To call ourselves stewards is to confess that the world is not ours. We receive it before we possess it. And what has been received as a gift asks something quite different from us than what has been acquired as commodity. A commodity can be exhausted and replaced. A gift carries memory, establishes relationship, and asks to be handed on.

Eventually, the direction of nurture must reverse. The child becomes the parent. The recipient becomes a steward. Then the question is no longer only What has nurtured me? but becomes What will I nurture in return?

By the end of that March day, the rain had worked through my clothes and the muscles in my arms, legs, and back and had begun to announce what the following morning would feel like. Behind us lay one acre of turned Texas soil.

One acre.

Measured against the ambitions of our age, it was almost nothing. Less than an hour away, engineers were building engines to cross distances that require numbers too large to picture. I had spent most of a day walking back and forth across a single field. 

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Yet the acre no longer felt small to me. Walking behind the horses had restored a scale that modern life makes easy to lose. At the speed of a plow, an acre becomes a world of its own. There are places where the blade enters easily and places where it resists, subtle rises and depressions invisible from a road. Progress measured not in miles but in furrows. You do not conquer such a place. If you are attentive, you begin to know it.

When I first wrote to Berry, I wanted to know how a person might live responsibly in a world whose problems seem to have escaped the scale of individual action. Our correspondence never made those problems smaller. But it slowly changed the scale at which I imagined an answer might begin. 

Not somewhere. 

Here. 

Not someday. 

Now.

I still look at the stars with wonder, and perhaps one day our descendants will walk beneath a Martian sky. If they do, I hope they carry the disciplines of the gardener and the farmer, the parent and the neighbor. I hope they understand that possessing the power to reach a place is not the same as possessing the wisdom to belong there. Most of all, I hope they have learned fidelity.

The world is being tended or neglected every day in places too small to make the news — in fields and backyards, in marriages and neighborhoods, in what we take and what we return. Nurture begins there. So does stewardship.