We briefly met Wendell Berry in the late 1980s, shortly after we were married, at a poetry reading and book signing at Village Books, in Bellingham. After the event, we handed him the book and told him that we were relative newlyweds. He took the book, bent over, and on the inside cover gently penned the words that have stuck with us ever since: “Scott and Linda, Welcome to the Country of Marriage.”
The words have been important to both of us in the decades that followed. The poem maps out beautifully and elegantly the spiritual and psychological “country of marriage,” in all of its beautiful, complex, puzzling, and rewarding ways.
I initially had considered naming my wedding officiating business The Country of Marriage. However, the Country of Marriage, I realized, refers more to a metaphor for the lived reality of marriage itself — the land two people enter when they commit their lives to each other. It’s about rootedness, labor, fidelity, and joy across a lifetime.
Wedding Country is that threshold space — the place where couples begin that journey. My role, I realized, is to help them mark the crossing, with words and ritual that honor both the celebration of the day and the life that will follow. In short, Berry’s Country of Marriage is the lifelong land of love and work a couple inhabits, while Wedding Country is the doorway — the place where that journey begins, and where I, as an officiant, help couples step across the border into their new life together.
That distinction matters, and it’s what makes Wendell Berry’s poem so enduring. In calling marriage a “country,” Berry invites us to imagine love not as a fleeting feeling or a single event, but as a place we must learn to inhabit. His poem, divided into seven movements, traces what it means to dwell in that land: the turning toward one another, the daily labor, the seasons of time, the rough ground and rootedness, and finally the blessing of belonging.
In the opening, Berry writes, “You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.” From the start, marriage is an intimate entrusting — one life carried within another.
Then he confesses, “I was a wanderer who feels the solace of his native land under his feet again and moving in his blood.” Marriage becomes a homecoming, the restless spirit settling into belonging.
The third section reads almost like a wedding vow itself, naming marriage as shared work — a land to be cultivated day by day.
By the fourth movement, Berry deepens the vulnerability: “I come to you lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes into the forest unarmed.” Here love is not control but surrender, an act of courage.
The fifth section carries one of his most famous lines: “You are the known way leading always to the unknown.” Marriage, in Berry’s telling, is both familiar and full of mystery.
In the sixth, he reminds us of the limits of life together: “Though we drink till we burst we cannot have it all, or want it all.” Fidelity means living gratefully within what is given, not endlessly chasing what lies beyond.
And finally, the closing section brings it all home — to rest, to joy, to the quiet blessing of belonging. The country of marriage is not perfect, but it is enough. It is where love has made its dwelling.
Though I searched the house recently, I wasn’t able to locate that signed copy of The Country of Marriage. Linda and I both agree: it cannot have left us. More likely, it rests in some “special place” we tucked away years ago, waiting to be found again. For now, the words remain with us even without the page to hold them. And perhaps that is Berry’s point after all: the country of marriage is not something you can misplace. It is carried in memory, in love, in the daily life we have built together. One day the book will turn up, and when it does, I’ll gladly share its picture. Until then, we hold the blessing itself, still moving in our blood.