Close to home!

      Wishing I knew more clearly how this time is for you?  Daily phone calls give me some clue. An email today told of the first person that I know who has the COVID virus. Likely others I know may have it but if they do I don't know.  Now that I know Martha has it, the virus moves out of the abstract into the immediate. Martha's in a long term care facility and unable to communicate by phone. When the people are known to me, people for whom I care, their pain and grief burdens me, too. 

    Martha's daughter-in-law, S.A., shared this Mary Oliver poem which, no surprise, speaks eloquently to the situation in which we find ourselves.

"My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird-

equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me

keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be

astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

to moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is

that we live forever."

Mary Oliver

     During this pandemic can we be found "standing still and learning to be astonished"?


Takk for alt,

Al