A Pretty Song
From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.
Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song,
And I say to my heart: rave on.
by Mary Oliver
Thirst
Pam sent me this word for the day: Theurgy, meaning “the working of a divine or supernatural agency in human affairs.” This image of the gorgeous Orion Nebula captures for me the wild, unknowable nature of the divine and how it can reveal itself in our lives. Within this “cavern roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming,” is something more – the inescapable need to accept what is beyond my grasp, my control or understanding. I love and hate that. Mostly I love it, because it leaves open the doors for what I cannot predict or manage on my own and for support from the unknown.
Theurgy also means “divine working,” meaning (from Wikipedia) “the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature, performed with the intention of invoking the action or evoking the presence of one or more gods, especially with the goal of uniting with the divine, achieving henosis, and perfecting oneself.”
In Toronto, a Tibetan lama is saying a puja for our daughter. He has given us a chant to say for her: Om banja guru path ma siddhi hung.” In Virginia, our telepathic friend is checking on her in her dreams. In Kauai, our astrologer is helping us understand this terrible darkness and where to look for light. Here at home I am burning a candle, bowing down, breathing, smelling the last of the lilacs and waiting for the irises.
Today, my words from the universe from TUT were, “Beyond your greatest fear, Paula, lies your greatest gift.” My greatest fear has happened. So perhaps now, my greatest gift is coming. What could that be? Something clothed in love, in forgiveness, in understanding, in compassion, in hope. Tucked at the bottom of that same email was this: “And your greatest gift, Paula, is the example you become.”
In any one moment
there is closing,
holding the center,
sheltering its
tender heart.
In any one moment
there is opening,
unfurling, one
soft breath after
another, revealing
you, revealing me.
I wait for the irises all year. Same with the peonies. There is something so extravagant, so sensuous about both that it is nearly impossible to do anything during their brief time but admire, investigate with my camera and savor. You can’t really pick the irises. They wilt qiickly, folding wetly inward on themselves. The peonies are better, but also lose heart soon, dropping reams of petals, their heavy heads falling.
So I spend time outside every morning, when the dew fall is heavy, looking at them through my lens, lying in the wet grass to catch a different angle, another way of seeing. Last year, I was shocked by the sexuality of the irises – their mouths opening like labia, the lift of their petals echoing what Georgia O’Keefe must have seen (I can feel her fierce pleasure) so many years ago.
But now they are pure potential. Ripening, preparing, gathering themselves for that final concert of color and scent. I like to think that each day, we are also pure potential. That we have the possibility for greatness: great invention, or kindness, or pleasure.
This year, my feeling of that potential is fractured by the absence of my daughter. I am missing the resonance, depth and delicious enjoyment that she brings to my life. It is as if the bass notes are faded, and the music of my days feels tinny and thin, painful even. Having lost both of my parents, I can honestly say that this absence is worse than a death. In death, there is a resolution, there is finality. With this, there is none of that hard comfort. It is only unrelenting, an airless, suspending unknown. I never knew that I was this vulnerable to an injury of heart and soul.
And yet perhaps in that unknown lives that pure potential – the possibility for beautiful resolution, for opening, for truth, for love, for harmony. I pray, I pray.
