Made in the light

That last entry got me poking through some old entries, and in the one about Karen K and Allen's wedding I found a couple of lines of verse I still like:

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,

containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.

That turns out to be from Wendell Berry's 1998 poem "The Country of Marriage," which I'm not sure I had read all the way through before. I'm a little dubious about a couple of bits, but mostly I like it quite a bit, and I love this part, which I think applies as well to unmarried life as to married:

Sometimes our life reminds me

of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing

and in that opening a house,

an orchard and garden,

comfortable shades, and flowers

red and yellow in the sun, a pattern

made in the light for the light to return to.

The forest is mostly dark, its ways

to be made anew day after day, the dark

richer than the light and more blessed,

provided we stay brave

enough to keep on going in.

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