One of the things I absolutely love about living this moment to moment experience of life are all the serendipitous things which happen in my life. Many are daily and sometimes they are even hourly.

Friday, after I had created my blog post on remembering, I went back to work clearing out old emails from an account which have some old saved letters dating back to February 2007. I had saved them, at the time, because I wanted to evaluate them when time allowed, in the hopes that they could contain some treasures.

Lo and behold, I was discarding an email from February 10^th, 2007 when I caught a glimpse of a poem at the bottom of the post. Since I had just been answering some comments on my Mary Oliver post of August 6^th, it was a pleasant surprise that this old email contained an Oliver poem entitled, When Death Comes.

With a grin on my face, I want to share that writing here:

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse 

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life                              
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom; taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

– Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems

This writing fits so nicely with the post I wrote on the 6^th, where I discussed how important it was to me to live my life in a way which I felt opened the possibility of creating a legacy.  This poem could not be more appropriate for me.

I absolutely love the idea of being married to amazement; being married to life as a groom in a constant bridal dance with every hour of each day.

When I think about how important it is to me that I leave a legacy,

I find this egoistic ambition pales in comparison to my desire to live each day as a child of amazement.

It certainly amazes me that this email found me, Friday, but then I really do live most days tickled by the way Life shows up when I am an open and willing student.

Thank you to Jerry Katz for sharing this poem.
Thank you to Mary Oliver
for penning these beautiful thoughts.
Mostly, thank you to Love
which keeps my eyes open
to the serendipity
which awaits me at every turn.

When we are still in the process of remembering who and what we are, we can be confused by the appearance of separateness. When we fully recall the Truth of our being, all sense of separation vanishes.

Think about these words from Tomas Stubbs:

You see an endless vista of mountain tops poking through the clouds. Hypnotized by belief that you are only the top of the mountain, you hardly even suspect your own depth. From this height it’s no wonder you feel isolated.

All it takes is to stop believing that limitation, and you begin to notice breaks in the cloud. When you stop living from the mind (just from the summit of the mountain), the cloud vanishes to reveal you are something far more vast.

Gradually you realize that the other mountain tops are like you, and eventually that all are connected, just ripples in one ground. Through acceptance of what is, acceptance of non-specialness, our true nature is revealed; To the mountain, the mountain top is just another rock.

When we actually awaken to the Truth of our being, we find ourselves like the Aspen tree which looks like a separate manifestation, to the naked eye, but just a little investigation reveals that entire groves of these special trees grow from one underground root system. At the core from which they arise, just as from the soul, which is the Truth of our being, there is only ONE. Everything is a manifestation of that Oneness.

I will leave you with these wise words that Tomas has shared on a page of his at NeverNotHere.com :

“Awakening is a funny thing, it´s never quite what you think it is. Even after the fact. For the longest time it seemed like the essential shift happened in a moment of realization. Now I see that the realization was just a moment of crystallisation, the head finally got what the heart had always been yearning for, what it already knew.

I have written before how I long to be like Mary Oliver. Oh, I have no desire to be a woman nor do I dream of possessing any of her physical attributes or accumulations. No, my longing is to have such an amazingly discerning eye, a gifted descriptive mind, and a vocabulary that allows for poetic expression without the groping that typifies my efforts in this arena. My desire is that words may flow from me, documenting observations which I have not even learned how to see, even in my most creative moments.

I suppose it is O.K. that I will never be a poet like Mary Oliver. I do not want to fight against “what is,” but I do want to read her book on creating poetry and I want to play with everything she can teach me.

While I expect she will help me learn the structure, in which to share the thoughts I have to convey (the “how”) I am not sure there is any hope for the “what” I’ll say. Perhaps the how will suffice until the what can be developed through time and practice, effort and patience.

I used to think that Mary was merely gifted at seeing nature and describing it in a way that allowed me to feel the feather, hear the song, or taste the air she described, but such an idea falls way short of the magnitude of her talent. True, she can perform the magic of translating what she sees into words which move from a page directly into ones heart, but she can use this talent to convey any human perception she experiences, thereby allowing the blessed readers the opportunity to live vicariously through her five senses and her sense of wisdom and intuition as well. I admire the way she holds nothing back.  Consider just the closing four verses from her poem Black Oaks, which I read in her book Blue Iris:

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
           little sunshine, a little rain

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
          one boot to another – why don’t you get going?

For there I am in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
          of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,
          I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

What a gift Mary Oliver’s poetry is to the world. I long to leave some type of legacy as my gift to humanity: not for self-aggrandizement, but for posterity, so that, if only in a small way, I can leave the planet a slightly better place than I found it. I wish I had recognized this desire when I was burning rubber in my twenties, killing brain cells which would be useful now, but alas there is no going back. At sixty it is not too late to find my voice and to leave a piece of me for a world that desperately needs beauty, Light, Love and hope.

This is my wish for this terrific Thursday. I would love to hear yours.