The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

Given: New Poems. Wind Publications 2005. 2004.

He is also an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is a prolific author of novels short stories poems and essays. Wendell Berry (born August 5 1934) is an American man of letters academic cultural and economic critic and farmer.