What Wendell Berry Still Teaches Us About Living Well

If you’ve got a few minutes, cue up Nick Offerman’s recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — it’s worth the watch. Between jokes about chainsaws and childhood chores, the Parks and Recreation star drops a line that could’ve come straight out of a Wendell Berry poem:

“Good work is our joy and salvation.”

That quote, Offerman tells Colbert, hangs on the wall of his woodshop. It’s a line Berry wrote decades ago, and it still rings true for anyone trying to live with a little more purpose and a little less noise.

Offerman’s new book, Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery, may be written for kids, but it’s really about rediscovering the kind of hands-on life that Berry’s been preaching about for more than half a century. “Learning how to do things together that require no screens,” Offerman says, “that’s what being a family is about.”

Hands That Remember

Offerman recalled how his parents taught him to handle sharp tools early — not to make him reckless, but responsible. “A sharp chisel is safer than a dull one,” he said, explaining that a sharp blade demands focus and respect.

It’s a good metaphor for life at any age. Work that requires our attention — gardening, sewing, fixing something — reminds us we’re still capable. Many seniors grew up that way, when mending clothes or tending a garden wasn’t quaint, it was common sense.

There’s joy in that kind of work — and dignity, too.

Berry’s Kind of Wisdom

Wendell Berry, the 89-year-old Kentucky farmer, essayist, and poet, has spent his life writing about this idea — that good work isn’t about productivity or profit. It’s about caring for what you touch.

He’s written that real satisfaction comes from labor that honors its purpose: “The work that serves the world.” Whether that’s growing tomatoes, fixing a leaky faucet, or building a bookshelf, it’s the same act of care.

Offerman put it more simply: “There’s not a lot you can do on your phone that makes your mom and dad proud. But make something with your hands — even a clumsy drawing — and you’re delivering love.”

10 Quotes from Wendell Berry...

...pulled from his essays and poems for everyone who cares about purpose, craft, and living with meaning.

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. ... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
“Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”
“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
“What I stand for is what I stand on.”
“To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew.”
“Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”
“If you don’t know where you’re from, you’ll have a hard time saying where you’re going.”
“…And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.”

For the Rest of Us

You don’t need a woodshop or a farm to practice Berry’s kind of living. Try fixing instead of replacing. Cook instead of ordering out. Send a handwritten note instead of a text.

Small gestures of care — for your home, your family, or the planet — remind us that affection and attention are the same thing.

That’s what Berry meant by it all turns on affection.

And it’s what Nick Offerman is trying to pass along, one sharp chisel — and one good laugh — at a time.