As our group mourned the death of our beloved member, Carol, we found ourselves meditating on these offerings
It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
and be born again, drawing up from the great roots.
Robert Bly
Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.
John O’Donohue – On the death of the beloved
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.
Mary Oliver – in Blackwater Woods
Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the colour blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.
David Whyte – Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world
The master calls a butterfly
The only thing that matters at the end of a stay on earth is
how well did you love?
What was the quality of your love?
Don’t be dismayed at good byes
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes
Is certain for those who are friends.
From Richard Bach’s – Messiah’s Handbook
WALKING TOGETHER
I don’t spend time with the broken
because I like pain, but because
I need to feel life
from inside its shell. Everywhere I turn, I witness
such resilience breaking out of
ordinary people: the fourteen year
old who was burned saving her
grandmother; the Black sergeant carrying his
white lieutenant out of live fire and how
they fell in the sand and cried in each
other’s arms; and the one with no arms
who keeps asking what she can carry.
I’m watching a hummingbird now
work so hard, its wings seem not
to be moving at all. Is this what
happens when we love?
I’ll tell you a secret. I ran a comb
through Grandma’s hair minutes after
she died. She was still warm, her Spirit
on its way. I still have the comb. And
when in doubt or awe, I get by myself
and finger the spaces in
that comb. How can I say this properly:
We can cheat death for a while
by feeding it things that are false.
And we can draw life out
by giving when we think
there’s nothing left.
Mark Nepo – Reduced to Joy
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
Harken 