Swimming in the Black River of Loss

 

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

And the black river of loss

whose other side

 

is salvation, whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

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: Excerpt from In Blackwater Woods

       

Yesterday was Mary Oliver’s birthday. Had she stayed with us another seven years, she could have passed into the other world in company with Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem. Though I don’t know if they ever met, she had much in common with Mr. Berry, both being poets who held the sacredness of the natural world in their trust and praised it with their words. While not an active feminist in the manner of Ms. Steinem, she certainly represented the autonomy and independence the feminist movement strove for, fully claiming her full humanity in a female body and choosing to love, without fanfare, another independent woman, Molly Cook, for their decades together. 

 

The above excerpt was from an early poem and a good reminder to Buddhists who view non-attachment as being aloof from this impermanent world, which becomes just another kind of armor for the heart to avoid the grief of loss. Here Ms. Oliver suggest attaching yourself deeply to the things you love like a limpet clinging to a rock, even as you know you will lose them. Love as deeply as you can and when the time comes to let go, let go with grace and acceptance. 

 

That sense of having loved beyond reason is somehow connected to our deep disappointments with the world, the betrayals that arrived unexpectedly when we spoke out on behalf of what we hoped to protect, the surprise we felt that others couldn’t see our outrage and complaints came from love, the surprise we felt when we finally understood that that indeed was and is their source. So as we travel onward, we need to slowly let those go as well, to unpack those needless rocks in our backpack and set them firmly but gently on the trail. We will always remember where they are and how they weighed us down, but we don’t need to carry them anymore. 

 

So thanks to Mary Oliver for this and other reminders as I hope to step forward lighter than before, with all my old and new loves settled into my very bones. The fires and black river of loss lie before me and I step forward anyway. 

 

PS Tonight I will watch the documentary about Ms. Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. Check it out!