Lighten Up

With the poor air quality this week I’ve been spending a lot of time indoors. Today I decided to play around with making photographs of some feathers and my tiny Buddha statue. It feels like a good day to

Lighten Up

by taking some time to play and relax. From the air quality predictions I’m hearing right now I think that I’ll be able to go out with my camera this evening. Who could have imagined that we would be looking at air quality predictions day after day here in Minnesota because of smoke from fires far far away! I wonder to myself whether this is the way life will be from now on. But then I tell myself to lighten up. The feather play with the Buddha statue today is a reminder to myself that even when bad things happen in the world, there is also great good to be found at the very same time.

This Mary Oliver poem speaks to the great paradox of light and dark co-existing in this short poem…

After Reading Lucretius,
    I Go to the Pond

The slippery green frog
that went to his death
in the heron’s pink throat
was my small brother,

and the heron
with the white plumes
like a crown on his head
who is washing now his great sword-beak
in the shining pond
is my tall thin brother.

My heart dresses in black
and dances.

   — Mary Oliver

Recently I found a photograph from a few years ago of two newly hatched robins. It reminds me of this Mary Oliver poem that I just read.

This Morning

This morning the redbirds’ eggs
have hatched and already the chicks
are chirping for food. They don’t
know where it’s coming from, they
just keep shouting, “More! More!”
As to anything else, they haven’t
had a single thought. Their eyes
haven’t yet opened, they know nothing
about the sky that’s waiting. Or
the thousands, the millions of trees.
They don’t even know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple
neighborhood event, a miracle is
taking place.

   — Mary Oliver

I recently added to my collection of Mary Oliver books by buying a copy of Devotions: The Selected Poems by Mary Oliver. I am finding so many of her poems that I haven’t read before. It is a great joy to find her addressing thoughts and feelings that I ponder regularly.

Are you also needing to lighten up these days my friends? How do you come back to yourself and to a sense of both security and hope in the midst of everything? I look to wonder, beauty, humor, and poetry as a balm for my aching soul.

May you walk in beauty.