The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this, too, was a gift.

- Mary Oliver

"To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest." - Pema Chodron

Everything Is Waiting For You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
Is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

--David Whyte

"Love courses through everything." - Fakhruddin Iraqi

"Being true to who we are means carrying our spirit like a candle in the center of our darkness." - Mark Nepo

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see." - Henry David Thoreau

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between." - Diane Ackerman

White Flowers

Last night
in the fields
I lay down in the darkness
to think about death,
but instead I fell asleep,
as if in a vast and sloping room
filled with those white flowers
that open all summer
sticky and untidy,
in the warm fields.
When I woke
the morning light was just slipping
in front of the stars,
and I was covered
with blossoms.
I don't know
how it happened-
I don't know
if my body went diving down
under the sugary vines
in some sleep-sharpened affinity
with the depths, or whether
that green energy
rose like a wave
and curled over me, claiming me
in its husky arms.
I pushed them away, but I didn't rise.
Never in my life had I felt so plush,
or so slippery,
or so resplendently empty.
Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers
begin.

--Mary Oliver

"Look at everything as though you were seeing it for either the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory." - Betty Smith

"God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open." -Hazrat Inayat Khan