"To love what is mortal"
Here is a poem for your weekend as the days grow darker and solstice draws near. I’ve spent many days this fall squeezing cattails with my daughters in dried creek beds following the year’s tremendous drought. I watched their faces nearly burst in delight each time the slightest pressure from their curious fingers seemed to beckon the seeds to throw themselves from the thick stems as if they’d been waiting to take flight on the crisp northerly wind.
But the ones with proximity to the remaining pools of water, blessed by gravity and water’s natural, generous yielding, don’t let go so easily. I can still see my youngest’s furrowed brow and hear her stomps over fallen leaves of sycamore and oak trees. “That one doesn’t want to play with me.” They are still clinging tightly to what for others is no longer within reach.
In these final days of waning light, may we have the courage to let go with grace when we are called. And make of ourselves, our souls, fertile ground for whatever seeds we may be lucky to catch on a warm breeze as the light make its return.
In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
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.