"The Uses of Sorrow"
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Right now many of us may feel as if our arms are full of darkness. Or if not yet, this darkness may be closer than we're used to. In our sleep we may feel this way. Or as we waken--disoriented, a little edgy, or even depressed. It takes awhile for our wonderful ways of coping to comfort us. A cup of coffee perhaps, a look out our window, the voices of our children, a cuddle or two. Whatever routine we've adopted during these at-home times.
This poet believes we can learn from sorrow, we can learn from grief, we can learn from our losses. We can choose to be softened, to keep going, to find whatever gifts there are in our communities and togetherness even while physically apart. Mary Oliver lived a long time. She died before this pandemic but at age 83 would have known others. The longer we live the more inevitable it is that there be darkness with the light. I find comfort here. I hope those nurses and doctors and all who are keeping us alive are finding their bit of comfort too.
"In Blackwater Woods"
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
These lines are from the last three stanzas of Oliver's poem about (inevitably) losing something that you love. She uses the burning of a forest that had sustained her as the vehicle for what she wants to express. The poem begins with flames from the trees turning their own bodies into pillars of light; next the cattails on fire; then the cinnamon smell of charred pine cones.
In these final stanzas she tells us how to live in such a world: a world that is mortal, where everything, everything, dies. Love it, hold it, hold it close against our bones--that close--and then when we have to, let go. So simply said, words that a child would know. When a poet starts with "To live in this world . . . " she needs insight greater than most. That Mary Oliver has. I can't explain why this brings comfort except that the truth almost always does. The truth, whatever it may be, sows its own kind of peace.
"The Veil"
There are moments when the veil seems
almost to lift, and we understand what
the earth is meant to mean to us -- the
trees in their docility, the hills in
their patience, the flowers and the
vines in their wild, sweet vitality.
Then the Word is within us, and the
Book is put away.
I bet we all have these moments more and more often as we rely upon nature for solace. Appreciating--no loving-- the trees, the hills, the flowers and vines. But the trees aren't always docile, we might say. Sometimes they bend frighteningly close to our shelter in the March winds. The hills aren't always patient; sometimes they send water and rock where we don't want it. And the vines aren't always sweet. Some, hairy and toxic, try to choke whatever they can. Still we recognize what Oliver is saying. When she writes, "[W]e understand what the earth is meant to mean to us," a special place might come to mind for each of us. Then God is with us too. Perhaps so close as to feel within.
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through him,
and without him was not any thing made that was made.
John 1:1-3
God bless us one and all, Nina Naomi
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