The Promise of Future Possibility
All Saints 2026
by Fumi
The poet, farmer, and prophet Wendell Berry has died. Uncle Wendell, as a dear friend and lover of poetry calls him, lived in Henry County in north central Kentucky, on a homestead called Lane’s Landing. His poems speak incisively of the excesses of modernity, our need to learn from the land, and a vision for the healing of the world.
In part 2 of his poem entitled Work Song, he writes of his vision for the future: “On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down an old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting its roots.” Insistent that this was no utopian fantasy, he writes a few lines further, “This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility.”
Here in Portland where our men’s soccer team is called the Timbers and our most famous coffee roaster is called Stumptown, most of the surrounding forests are what are called second- or third-growth forests – forests which have grown back after having been clearcut and harvested en masse. A truly old forest – what is called an old growth – is rare, as 95% of them on the West Coast (and 99% in the Eastern U.S.!) have already been felled by “greed and ignorance.”
To walk into a grove of old growth cedar or maple is to enter hallowed ground.
Fumi and a western red cedar tree
Yet to walk into a grove of old growth cedar or maple is to enter hallowed ground. I remember my surprise and awe when, last summer, after having packed up my car at the end of a camping trip, I accidentally stumbled into a small grove of old growth western red cedar, just at the far end of the campground. It was like stepping into an entirely different world: here the moss was thick, the silence deep, and the trees alive. These giant cedars were coursing with vitality, a stream of energy flowing uninhibited from root to trunk to branches, and all I had to do was put my hand (haltingly, reverently, slowly) onto the bark to feel its life force rush through my own body.
In that forest, I touched both the sacred force of an ancient forest, and the enormity of what we’ve lost. In our desacralized world, trees, rocks, and water are no longer seen as alive but as dead matter, ingredients for our industrial machinery. What madness has compelled us to cut down 95% – ninety-five percent! – of our sacred forests?
How do we move forward as the generation that lives on the verge of the extinction of trees? What will it take for us to live into a future in which “where greed and ignorance cut down an old forest, an old forest will stand”?
Perhaps it’s a combination of “work” and “song,” as the poem’s title suggests – to work, and work, and work for the thriving of all beings, and then to sing – to celebrate – the sacredness of life.
The power of poetry is the power of imagination. The poetic feat of Work Song is Berry’s ability to see what is not there – an old forest, standing on the remains of a clearcut hillside. And this, I think, is also the task of the Catholic Worker movement – to envision a world that is not yet here, but which we deeply desire. And so, at Dandelion House, we continue to plant hundreds of native plants, not because habitat restoration on our small acre of land is the solution to our spiritual and ecological crisis, but because we want our lives to be a poem that sparks the imagination and points to new possibilities. We plant ferns, sedges, swamp roses, oregon grapes, bleeding hearts, and yes, even a fledgling western red cedar, barely 5 feet tall, because we believe the future does not have to look like the present.
This, too, is perhaps part of the mystery we celebrate on All Saints day. On this day, we look back on our ancestors – the well-known saints like Francis and Therese, the poets like Uncle Wendell, and also our old growth forests, the very ones we so ignorantly cut down – and we pray that their lives, love, and imagination might flow into us, and, in that way, shape our future.
Our ancestors are not reminders of a utopian past; they are the promise of future possibility.
Uncle Wendell, pray for us.
Old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, pray for us.
All holy beings, pray for us.