…let all things seen and unseen their notes together blend…
-The day of resurrection!
At church last weekend I was struck in particular by this line. More and more, my experience of reality – of the seen – is colored by, and inextricable from, the unseen.
We think the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
-Pema Chodron
Shared on Instagram after I saw this on another accout I love.
Unexpected wonders happen,
not on schedule,
or when you expect or
want them to happen,
but if you keep hanging around,
they do happen.
~ Wendell Berry
Another beauty from First Sip.
I’m going to be off for the next two weeks for spring break with Matt, Grace, and Whit. Back soon!
The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory–there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.”
–Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hands in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
~ Mary Oliver
Thank you to my friend Allison for sharing this poem with me. I adore it.