3 things

Today, because I'm coming up for a significant anniversary, I'm thinking of living, love and death. You know, the stuff of which poetry and story are basically made.

For you today, three things from each of two wise women:


'...To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.'

Mary Oliver, from 'In Blackwater Woods'


‘Three things differentiate living from the soul versus living from the ego only. They are: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to learn deep love over time… it is not from the everchanging ego that we love one another, but rather from the wild soul… It takes a heart that is willing to die and be born and die and be born again and again.’  

Clarissa Pinkola Estes from Women Who Run with the Wolves


And because it glances at death, and also has just appeared in this month's Green Spirit magazine, I'm going to include here too an excerpt from one of my poems, The Perfect Tense (from Looking For Icarus).

‘I don’t fear death,’ said Peter today,

            ‘only the dying.’

I am now, I realise, one of the initiates who know

             the truth: that death is an inescapable promise;

                                    a truth that will overtake me, too.

The light through water,

                                    under the cloud canopy,

is beautiful now, and frail -

                        it says it will not last;

and it promises, while it does, that it will loose something

in us

to wander towards the horizon

                        and go on wandering.

If you tune everything else out the silence you hear is the white noise

            of the singing spheres: the voice of the universe.

                        You can never get to its edge

                                    and yet

you could fit millions of universes on the already-crowded head

            of that pin, with all those minute-particle-angels.

            Come back, Giordano Bruno; they wouldn’t burn you

these days. Your ‘heresies’ are practically orthodoxy.

                                    The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way

                        our umbilicus. Is it

             a consolation

that the stuff of which we’re made is star-stuff too?

                        That wherever you go you can never totally disappear -

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.

            Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.

© Roselle Angwin  2005/2015