I live in unfamiliar places:
The unknowing of empty spaces
Between what was and what is yet to be.
It is the hardest earthly place for me
To dwell within, pause, absolutely still.
Knowing only God and love can fill
The wanting, one drop at a time.
It's only through the heart's abiding
That Wisdom might be found hiding
In the shadows of such Sacred Pause.
I offer up what was to mourn in empty spaces,
Let go of worn embraces
So what is yet to be
May somehow birth in me.
I am thinking, or trying to think, about all the
Imponderables for which we have
no answers, yet endless interest all the
Range of our lives...
Mystery, after all, is God’s other name...
But, but---
excuse me now, please; it’s morning, heavenly bright,
and my irrepressible heart begs me to hurry on
Into the next exquisite moment.
~ Mary Oliver from "Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn" in SWAN
...You formed my inward being,
You knit me together in my mother's womb...
Your mysteries fill me with wonder!
More than I know myself do You know me;
my essence was not hidden from You,
When I was being formed in secret,
intricately fashioned from the elements of the earth...
...May you know in your soul that there is no need to be afraid...You are not going somewhere strange. You are going back to the home you never left. May you have a wonderful urgency to live your life to the full...May your going be sheltered and your welcome assured. May your soul smile in the embrace of your anam cara.
~ John O'Donohue in ANAM CARA: A BOOK OF CELTIC WISDOM
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn...
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what will it be like, that cottage of darkness?...
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement...
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real...
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
~ Mary Oliver, excerpts from "When Death Comes" in NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, VOL. 1
I am done with talk of death except as it
is a part of life, one side of a sphere
whose roundness would otherwise be
incomplete. In a letter van Gogh wrote,
"The earth had thought to be flat...
science has proved that the world is
round... they persist nowadays in
believing that life is flat and runs from
birth to death. However, life, too, is
probably round."
What I've seen on my rounds is that if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to reflect at the end of a life, then love is revealed as the great currency. It's the thing. The treasury. It's what mattered...
How well did I love? whom did I love?, and how was love central to the life that I made for myself?
...When the lots are counted, when we are gathered in, we will find that it was love that mattered. Love expressed, given, received, fought for. So for those of us fighting right now, I say; keep going. As a culture, as an individual, believe in the full life that is your bequeathed inheritance, not the subterranean half-life that terror and impoverished minded bullies will try and spike your wine with. You are too good for that.
~ Martin Shaw in A COUNSEL OF RESISTANCE AND DELIGHT IN THE FACE OF FEAR
What if your dying is an angel? And what if your dying job, should you choose to accept it,
is to wrestle this angel of your dying instead of fighting it? ...Wrestling isn't what happens
to you. It is what you do. And you will not be alone in it...Living your way of life wrestles
the way life has of being itself: That is how meaning is made...That is what the news of your
death could mean: It could mean the beginning, unadorned, common, and singular, of your
one true life and its work...
Come to your death as an angel to wrestle instead of an executioner to fight or flee from and
you turn your dying into a question instead of an edict: What shall my life mean? What
shall my time of dying be for? What is it going be like, that cottage of darkness?
...when destiny draws you
into these spaces of poverty,
and your heart stays generous
until some door opens into the light,
you are quietly befriending your death;
so that you will have no need to fear
when your time comes to turn and leave,
that the silent presence of your death
would call your life to attention...
to the urgency to become free
and equal to the call of your destiny.
~ John O'Donohue, "For Death" in TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US
It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life, and
I count in the greatest good fortune to have these few months so full of interest and instruction in
the knowledge of my approaching death. It is as simple as one's own person as any fact of nature,
the fall of a leaf or the blooming of a rose, and I have a delicious consciousness, ever present, of
wide spaces close at hand, and whisperings of release in the air.
