Hello, I wish everyone well in this bright sunny August here in the UK.
The photo in this post was taken on a sunny late July day last week, featuring two rather magnificent Belted Galloways with the coastline and Whitby headland in the background.
I apologise to those who were expecting an Open Practice in July. I caught Covid again and was ill enough for it to stop me doing much for a short while. I’m mostly recovered now, but have paused Open Practice for the time being. I am also briefly pausing writing this offering. The main reason is to create a space to process some unexpected news, deep grief, and begin to do what I can to be with a very dear friend at the end of their life, and to gently let them go.
Mary Oliver’s poems have offered me much solace at so many critical points in my life. At the moment ‘In Blackwater Woods’, feels particularly apt. Allowing the howl to come from within.
I realise this isn’t a comforting read, if it does resonate with anyone at the moment, the poem is below. Mortality is of course, very much about living. Allowing ourselves to love, comes with the inevitability of loss. I’m not adding here to the trove of wonderful writing on loss and grief, I’m merely repeating someone else’s great words. I hope we can all be really tender with ourselves and others, especially in heightened times when the everyday feels raw.
Sending love and wishing you well, Karen.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
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, from American Primitive (1983)