Mary Oliver Poem

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.

CLICK HERE to visit www.maryoliver.com