lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy….
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground….
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
— WENDELL BERRY, “A VISION”
If you’ve ever felt truly privileged to provide for or care for another being, human or otherwise, even yourself, or if you’ve ever translated an inspiration or vision into art or song, or into a manuscript, an invention, or a community project, then you’ve experienced and taken pleasure in the wholehearted and clearheaded qualities of your Nurturing Generative Adult. If you’ve ever dedicated yourself to the renewing and enriching of a ruined place — a clear-cut forest, a polluted river, or an overgrazed prairie — or rolled up your sleeves and volunteered to serve families or neighborhoods, then you’ve had a firsthand relationship with the North facet of your Self. If you’ve ever acted in defense of an oppressed people or an endangered species, spoken truth to power without desire for personal gain, or occupied public space in support of true democracy, then you’ve known your North Self in masterly action.
To nurture is to care for the well-being of other humans, our fellow creatures, Earthly habitats, and ourselves. To be generative is to design and implement innovative cultural practices that imaginatively and effectively restore, solve, or shelter, that truly serve the whole person and the web of life (endeavors in education, for example, or governance or healing). To be an adult, in this sense, is to enthusiastically and competently embrace opportunities to enhance the vitality of beings, places, and communities, present and future — and, where you don’t find such opportunities, to creatively generate them.
Every human is born with the capacity to be abundantly nurturing and generative. Some find it easy and natural to develop and embody this aspect of our humanity. Others experience it as awkward and challenging. But learning to embody the North facet of the Self is always an essential dimension of becoming fully human. We foster wholeness in ourselves when we contribute to the wholeness of something greater than ourselves.
Wendell Berry is a prolific author, an eloquent critic of our culture and economies, and a fifth-generation Kentucky farmer. In his poem that begins this chapter, he offers a vision of the many generations of hard work awaiting us this century and beyond, the labor necessary to restore the land and waters and engender healthy human communities existing in harmony and synergistic partnership with the greater Earth community. The Nurturing Generative Adult is an essential facet of the Self needed to accomplish this demanding and joyous work. Wendell Berry is an inspiring role model of a mature human with a well-developed North.
Thomas Berry — no immediate blood relation to Wendell — was a cultural historian, a Christian monk, and one of our leading twentieth-century environmental thinkers. At age eleven, Thomas ventured out for the first time behind his family’s new home in North Carolina. It was late May. He came to a creek, crossed it, and there beheld an astonishing meadow covered with blooming white lilies and filled with song. Writing seventy years later, he reflects,
A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky….
…Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation a well as in education and religion.1
This extraordinary watershed moment during his boyhood informed Thomas’s entire life and formed the substance, content, and method of his way of nurturing and providing for his people, who Thomas came to recognize as all the species of our world. His love for creation, for our entire cosmos, stands as a moving example of what it is for a human being to be nurturing and generative.
The North facet of our innate human wholeness is that which enables us to genuinely nurture others, provide for those less able, care for the environment that sustains us all, defend the lives of future generations of all species, carry forward the life-enhancing traditions and wisdom of our ancestors, and contribute to the vitality of our human communities.
NURTURING LOVE
Love. All four facets of the Self begin with love, are anchored in love. Yet each facet features its own favored form of love. The North facet of the Self is rooted in a nourishing and boldly resourceful love, like Thomas Berry’s for the Earth, a parent for her child, a devoted teacher for his students, or a true friend for another. This North aspect of love can also be seen in a benevolent leader for her people, a boy for his dog, a mature hunter for each species that feeds her family, and a healthy human community for the particular ecosystem within which it is embedded.
Nurturing love is embodied in a great variety of activities, such as healing, mentoring, parenting, teaching, feeding, protecting, consoling, encouraging, celebrating, and empathically listening and responding.
We are naturally moved and inspired when we meet people who exhibit exemplary development of the Nurturing Adult facet of their Self, or hear stories of their lives, individuals such as Jesus of Nazareth, Francis of Assisi, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King. But each one of us possesses this capacity for nurturing others in a way that evokes people’s courage, magnificence, and ability to self-heal. Each of us can remember times we stretched beyond our usual borders and found ourselves able to support and care for another selflessly and joyously, with love and compassion flowing freely through our hearts and hands. Some of us may have wholly embodied this capacity only a few times in our lives, but the fact that it happened even once confirms that this capacity has always been within us — and that it still is.
One way to evoke your Nurturing Adult is to recall inspiring exemplars you’ve known — maybe an uncle, your mother, a teacher, or a friend. You might imagine one such person standing behind you with their hands on your shoulders, conveying with a strong, warm touch their love for and faith in you, and imparting with their words their unconditional support and guidance.
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