I'd like to marry Wendell Berry

I've been reading a collection of Wendell Berry's essays lately. Usually I don't read things with a pencil in hand unless it's for a class or something specific. But Berry is so full of beautiful beautiful language and precise ideas and ...ah!! I just love him. It's going to be difficult for me to restrain myself from posting daily excerpts accompanied by rapturous, rambling praise. However, there were two brief passages I read today in his essay "A Native Hill" that I thought were just very lovely, and that said similar things in different ways.

"The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever."

I think that just struck me because my life feels so striving, sometimes. Always trying to get the next thing done, the next task accomplished, the next goal met. Which is good, of course, or can be, but leaves a residual frustration that I can't fully devote myself to any one thing because I have such limited time in which to do so much. Surely that can't be the way God intended us to live out our days. Lilies of the field, and don't be anxious about anything, and all that, right? The other passage (on the opposite page from this one) is this:

"Too much that we do is done at the expense of something else, or somebody else. There is some intransigent destructiveness in us. My days, though I think I know better, are filled with a thousand irritations, worries, regrets for what has happened and fears for what may, trivial duties, meaningless torments - as destructive of my life as if I wanted to be dead. Take today for what it is, I counsel myself. Let it be enough...We are in the habit of contention - against the world, against each other, against ourselves.

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are."

I think, for me at least, so much of that constant striving and grasping and anxiety appears when I refuse to allow that I'm small, and not God, and can't do it all by myself. I can't, by sheer force of will and strenuous effort, learn to be better than I am. Yes, of course you can work to "improve" yourself...all those things we resolve to do differently with each new year. But letting things be enough, resting in the knowledge that the answers are external to ourselves, that the ends are bigger than ourselves... oh Wendell. Why are you so old and married?