Kristin, thank you so much for sharing this moving poem with us -- every line is so rich, but this one especially has become a mantra for me since reading it again last week: "I rest in the grace of the world." I also just shared this poem as the first one in our new community edition (which I was inspired to turn into a series this time!), so thank you for getting the series off to such a beautiful start this week 🤍✨
Me, too. The Peace of Wild Things and Wild Geese have both helped me recenter when “despair for world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be.”
Switter, this was the very first poem I ever came across of Mary Oliver's, so I love that you shared it here -- and as you might notice today in the start of our new community edition, you also helped inspire the cover artwork for the series, so I am doubly grateful to you 😊🙏
Candace, you have a very special gift and I am blessed to be on the receiving end. Thank you so much for what you do.
The poem you posted today comforted me more than once, but during an especially trying time, almost exactly as Berry describes in his poem, it was exactly what I needed to hear. I left the story in a comment.
Switter, I seem to be perennially behind on comments right now! But I wanted to be sure to thank you for your kind and generous words here -- they mean so much.
I also wanted to be sure to let you know that "Wild Geese" will be the final poem of our new community edition today :) so thank you so much as well for bringing the series to such a beautiful end this week.
Sending gratitude your way today, on this most momentous of days 🙏🙏
Sarah, this is an incredible poem -- I can’t thank you enough for sharing it. I’ve found myself meditating on so many of its lines over the past couple of weeks, especially "a holiness that exists inside everything."
I also wanted to be sure to let you know that I’ll be sharing this poem tomorrow as the next installment of our new community edition (which I was inspired to turn into a series this time!), so thank you again for sharing such moving words with us 🤍✨
Thank you for this wonderful invitation and your beautiful heart, which you so generously share. My favorite poem is one of e. e. cummings’. I often sing it and offer it as a prayer when I’m feeling up or down.
“i thank you god for most this amazing day” by e. e. cummings
One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost is “The Road Not Taken”. I was introduced to Robert Frost and his poems in the fourth grade and love all of them. This is my favorite part of the poem:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that had made all the difference.
Thank you for your lovely thoughts and illustrations. I enjoy all of them immensely. ❤️🍁🍂🐿️🌲
I've lived with depression for a great proportion of my life and though happiness comes and goes it's hard to remember when your bluest days are upon you. Clarice Lispector wrote in Near to the Wild Heart
A softly somber color had settled on the fields warm from the last sunlight and the light breeze flew slowly. I must not forget, though, that I have been happy, that am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I've always forgotten.
It resonates so much for me and though maybe not the words you meant to hear but all the same I reach for them, to be reminded that the remembering of happiness is something we all struggle with. So simple and so easily forgotten is the joy of yesterday.
Wendell Berry’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ always helps me:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Kristin, thank you so much for sharing this moving poem with us -- every line is so rich, but this one especially has become a mantra for me since reading it again last week: "I rest in the grace of the world." I also just shared this poem as the first one in our new community edition (which I was inspired to turn into a series this time!), so thank you for getting the series off to such a beautiful start this week 🤍✨
Me, too. The Peace of Wild Things and Wild Geese have both helped me recenter when “despair for world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be.”
To my harshest critic, me:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver
Switter, this was the very first poem I ever came across of Mary Oliver's, so I love that you shared it here -- and as you might notice today in the start of our new community edition, you also helped inspire the cover artwork for the series, so I am doubly grateful to you 😊🙏
Candace, you have a very special gift and I am blessed to be on the receiving end. Thank you so much for what you do.
The poem you posted today comforted me more than once, but during an especially trying time, almost exactly as Berry describes in his poem, it was exactly what I needed to hear. I left the story in a comment.
Again, thank you for sharing your gifts with us.
Switter, I seem to be perennially behind on comments right now! But I wanted to be sure to thank you for your kind and generous words here -- they mean so much.
I also wanted to be sure to let you know that "Wild Geese" will be the final poem of our new community edition today :) so thank you so much as well for bringing the series to such a beautiful end this week.
Sending gratitude your way today, on this most momentous of days 🙏🙏
I love your blog! Lately I find myself reading and re-reading "Adrift" by Mark Nepo: Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
Sarah, this is an incredible poem -- I can’t thank you enough for sharing it. I’ve found myself meditating on so many of its lines over the past couple of weeks, especially "a holiness that exists inside everything."
I also wanted to be sure to let you know that I’ll be sharing this poem tomorrow as the next installment of our new community edition (which I was inspired to turn into a series this time!), so thank you again for sharing such moving words with us 🤍✨
Derrick Walcott’s “Love After Love”:
“The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self,
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love-letters from the bookshelf
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your own life.”
Walcott’s words are my frequent touchstone. Enjoy!
Phyllis
Phyllis, this is beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for this wonderful invitation and your beautiful heart, which you so generously share. My favorite poem is one of e. e. cummings’. I often sing it and offer it as a prayer when I’m feeling up or down.
“i thank you god for most this amazing day” by e. e. cummings
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
Also my go to!
« The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; don’t go back to sleep. ». -Rumi
We are in the midst of recovery after a hurricane in North Carolina.
Even more than ever, I reach for the words of Julian of Norwich, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well".
Thank you for your lovely words and illustrations. I always look forward to reading your newsletters. 💚🌿
Sending all of you strength and love across the world Jan. What you are all dealing with is so hard.💗
I have no idea of the origin of this poem, but I have loved it since I was very young.
Kiss me with mangoes, still on your lips,
embrace me with dewberries clinging.
Woo me when winds of morning are birds softly singing.
Hold me while summer cherries turn red upon the reddest vine,
and sun-ripe scuppernongs turn bronze upon a swaying vine.
Caress me where wild strawberries crush beneath our dancing feet,
and pomegranates hang like love, intricately sweet.
Today this poem from Abigail Cook (shared by Beth Kempton) gave me goosebumps
Rise
And when they try
to clip your wings,
tell you to sit down, shut up:
rise.
When they tell you
you are too much this way
and too little that way:
rise.
Remember you are falcon bones
and phoenix wings,
so fly.
You are worthy.
One of my favourite reminders that we are what we focus on. 'This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.' Rumi
This is my go to poem for inspiration and strength.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley - 1849-1903
So good! "The bludgeonings of chance"!
Only the soul knows what love is. Rumi
I am enough. I trust myself. I choose my life.
This never fails to make me stand up taller, take a deep breath, and think clearly and without fear about the next minute or step forward.
One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost is “The Road Not Taken”. I was introduced to Robert Frost and his poems in the fourth grade and love all of them. This is my favorite part of the poem:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that had made all the difference.
Thank you for your lovely thoughts and illustrations. I enjoy all of them immensely. ❤️🍁🍂🐿️🌲
I've lived with depression for a great proportion of my life and though happiness comes and goes it's hard to remember when your bluest days are upon you. Clarice Lispector wrote in Near to the Wild Heart
A softly somber color had settled on the fields warm from the last sunlight and the light breeze flew slowly. I must not forget, though, that I have been happy, that am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I've always forgotten.
It resonates so much for me and though maybe not the words you meant to hear but all the same I reach for them, to be reminded that the remembering of happiness is something we all struggle with. So simple and so easily forgotten is the joy of yesterday.
There is one section of a very emotional duet from the musical Sunday in the Park with George,
the Sondheim musical about the artist George Seurat. The song is "Move On" these lines always hit me in the chest.
"Stop worrying where you're going—
Move on
If you can know where you're going
You've gone
Just keep moving on
I chose, and my world was shaken—
So what?
The choice may have been mistaken
The choosing was not
You have to move on"