The World Tells a Story
Photo: Unsplash - Mark Olsen @markolsen
DISCLAIMER: I wrote this post almost two weeks ago. I debated about posting it. I know many people come here for content about the joys and celebrations experienced in The Precious Days of retirement, and I know how much I love writing about those things. But there are sorrows and grief in those days, too, making the days that are ordinary and full of joy all the more precious. As I continue to navigate my days and move forward with life, I believe it’s important to bear witness to the challenges and tragedies this world seems to hold (with the greatest frequency I can ever remember in my adult life). I grieve for and honor the innocent people who are not able to move on. I have decided to post this as it is, and as it was earlier in the month.
Once again, this was not the post I intended to write. I was longing to return to topics more reflective of living The Precious Days. Yet from the horrendous events of October 7 and the deaths of so many innocent people to the horrific mass shooting in Maine, with communities far and near living in fear, I felt I had to bear witness to this “story to break your heart.” Even as the news was shared that the gunman in Maine had been found dead, there were fresh images of Israel advancing a ground war into Gaza.
So I felt I could not bring myself to write about the usual topics of my life in a blog post. And I don’t have the energy to go on about the politics of it all, and what needs to change in a country that has lost its way, along with this increasingly unstable and violent world. Nor do I have the words to express my sorrow, my anger, and my outrage. These heavy times are breaking so many of us. And so, I go about my life, weighted with sadness, but refusing to accept that we are powerless to change things. I am thinking through how I can take some action, to be part of positive change in a way that I can say, “This must change and here’s what I am doing.”
But for now, as I often do, I turn to poetry to help me make sense of the senseless and express what I can’t. Poetry is solace for me. I share poems with friends to celebrate, to mourn, to reflect, to acknowledge, and to wonder and marvel. Poetry is a space to draw in a healing breath and exhale a confirmation that someone, a poet, has given voice to the moment in time you occupy. A poem can bear witness, too.
“What can a poem do? A poem is a not a tourniquet when you’re bleeding. It’s not water when you’re thirsty or food when you’re hungry. A poem can’t protect you from an airstrike, or from abduction, or from hate. It’s hard to write when our words feel like they’re not enough—they can’t do the real, tangible work of saving lives, or making people safer. But can they remind us of our humanity? I think they can, and I think we desperately need a reminder.”
I love this quote from Maggie Smith. Mary Oliver’s Lead is such a poem. Sometimes it can seem like there are too many places in life’s journey where hope is not alive, where pain is so stark that it breaks our hearts. But if, as Mary writes, that deep grief can break our hearts open, then we must hold space to testify, to feel deeply, both the bleak and the beautiful. It is still my endless hope that such capacity is what defines us as human.
Lead
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver, (New and Selected Poems Volume Two), Beacon Press.
Recently the sun has been breaking through to remind me of all there is to love. I will return to celebrating The Precious Days very soon. Thanks for staying with me here.
