Some months ago, in our Interdisciplinary Team Meeting at Community Health and Counseling Services Hospice, where I work as Spiritual Advisor, I had occasion to read one of famed and beloved poet Mary Oliver's poems. I think experiencing this poem has the ability to bring us down to where each of us can find our inner roots to the dark Earth. . . to that place within where all that that is raw and real in us meets our deepest sense of safety. It is a rare poet who can do a thing like this. Here is her poem: 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.
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Rev. Maya Massar Archives
September 2023
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