Whenever I worry about things falling apart (which in today’s world is quite often), I am now also working on letting go of that thought and replacing it with another. A friend reminded me yesterday that we don’t know what will happen and that one way we can all stay sane is to re-frame our negative thoughts.
That sounds like a good idea to me. Every time I begin thinking things are falling apart, I now plan to work on noticing those thoughts and then embrace the idea that things are
Falling Together
Years ago during a difficult time in my life when I was seeing a therapist, I said something to her about feeling afraid of falling apart. Her reply was, “I prefer to think of it as falling together.” I held onto those words long after I first heard them from her and they still resonate for me today.
Although the world looks bleak on many fronts, maybe things aren’t falling apart, maybe they are falling together. Sometimes things have to unravel before a new reality can be created. Other times we need a wake-up call to remind us of what really matters. It feels like this is one of those times.
During this time of COVID restrictions I feel like I am waking up and recognizing my essential connections with family, friends, and nature while letting go of non-essentials. So many unimportant activities have fallen away. My deepest wish for after COVID is for all of us to stay awake and aware, to be falling together into a new story of cooperation, care, and regeneration.
Don’t go back to sleep
The danger is that our desire for things to “return to normal” will mean many of us fall back into the trance of separation, mindless consumption, and careless destruction of all that really matters. I think that it is important that we take forward the positives that we have discovered during this time so that we may be falling together into creating a better world for our children and grandchildren.
And now, for a seasonal poem by who else, Mary Oliver.
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.— Mary Oliver
May you walk in beauty.
Note: photos in today’s post are from my visit to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum this morning. I drove around the 3-mile drive pausing to make photographs out of my window. I didn’t get out to hike there because there were so darn many people crowded together on the trails and sidewalks without masks or social distancing. People, I ask you what part of “Do not enter” and “Wrong Way” do you not understand? It seems everyone was going wherever they pleased without the least bit of concern for others. Okay, I feel better having done my rant for the day. Still, it was beautiful, if only from the seat of my car. And then I stopped at Lake Minnewashta Regional Park on my way home and took a short walk all by myself with nary a human in sight. Ahhh… life is good.
Lonely beach at Lake Minnewashta
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