I’m still reading Mary Oliver’s Devotions, just very slowly. As in, I took a break this summer. This morning I returned to this practice and the first poem I read was At the River Clarion. The whole poem hit me hard, but especially these passages:
If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics.
He’s the forest, He’s the desert.
He’s the ice caps, that are dying.
He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.
He’s van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell.
He’s the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons.
He’s every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet.
And if this is true, isn’t it something very important?
And this:
There was someone I loved who grew old and ill.
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do
except to remember
that we receive
then we give back.
We receive then we give back.
How can I give back in this time when I am emotionally shackled by hopelessness in this world? This is something that I desperately need to work out.
