Sundays are Spirituality Day here at Taking it to the Streets
West Wind #2
You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.
~ Mary Oliver ~
And from Roger Housden’s “Ten Poems to Open Your Heart” – the opening coda to his discussion on this poem is a quote from Mary Oliver:
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down for the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.”
This is a magnificent poem and Housden’s commentary on it is brilliant as well.
We bumble along, focusing on minutiae, worrying and fretting away our days, too often worrying about things which will either never happen, or things over which we have no control. Which distracts us from “that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming.”
Or, I think we sense the “embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming” and mistake our excitement for fear and so turn back to the litany of mundane cares that pull us away from our true being.
There was once a collection of Doonesbury cartoons, the title of which has always stayed with me – “Dare to be Great, Ms. Caucus.”
Or – as Mary Oliver says in another of her brilliant poems – “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Isn’t it the question that always eludes us? the one that we spend so much time pondering? if there was a “how to” discover this path, it would inevitably keep us from discovering all of the things that are not the path.
I like this poem it describes me im always looking for the easy path
I need some help to find deep questions on this can anyone help me?