Embracing Our Wild and Precious Lives

In her book Spring, Mary Oliver says:

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring.

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

     In one of her many portrayals of the power, beauty, and teaching offered by the natural world, Mary Oliver invites is to consider  learning to love and fully embrace this world. I am struck by the parallel to Rumi’s remindiers that we are “inside the majesty….
where “….everything is music.”

Elsewhere, Rumi says:

One day I went to a place beyond dawn

a source of sweetness that flows

and is never less.

I have been shown a beauty that is

beyond imagining….

     May we all cherish this and every precious day we are given. Blessings to our poets, musicians and artists for illuminating the path.

     Please visit me at www.coupleswisdom.com.

     Blessings to all.

Advertisement