this rain

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,

you are sitting under your porch roof,

looking down through the trees

to the river, watching the rain.  The circles

made by the raindrops' striking

expand, intersect, dissolve,

and suddenly (for you are getting on

now, and much of your life is memory)

the hands of the dead, who have been here

with you, rest upon you tenderly

as the rain rests shining

upon the leaves.  And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness

of the thought of Heaven, for now

you have imagined yourself there,

remembering with longing this

happiness, this rain.  Sometimes here

we are there, and there is no death.

Wendell Berry

Photo: Peter Bowers

joy

is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self

forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in

communion with what formerly seemed outside, but

is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice

speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter,

affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music

in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable

presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating 

beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between

what we previously thought was us and what we

thought was other than us. 

Joy can be made by practiced, hard-won achievement

as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace

arrived out of nowhere; joy is a measure of our

relationship to death and our living with death, joy is the 

act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are

asked to, joy is practiced generosity. If joy is a deep

form of love, it is also the raw engagement with the

passing seasonality of existence, the fleeting presence

of those we love understood as gift, going in and out

of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas of the first

spring day or a wood fire in winter, the last breath

of a dying parent as they create a rare, raw, beautiful

frontier between loving presence and a new and 

blossoming absence.

To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become

fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to

have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping

away of the anxious worried self felt like a 

thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away,

overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability

of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace

and a source, the claiming of our place in the living 

conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the

presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar

face - I was here and you were here and together we

made a world.

David Whyte

Consolations

Photo: Peter Bowers

don't hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that's often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Mary Oliver

Photo: Peter Bowers

mysteries, yes

 

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds

will never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver