Embracing all of life, sadness and all

Dan Rather posted this quote from writer Louise Erdrich on his Facebook page today, and I wanted to share it with you.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

I am adding a few more quotes today, written by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite writers.

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

She also wrote this:

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”

And last but not least, she offers her take on the gift of darkness in a life:

The Uses Of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

"Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”

Cries of despair

Yesterday as I was walking to the garden down the road I usually take, I became aware of two seagulls flying overhead, quite agitated, swooping down and circling and then rising again. Their calls were piercing and intense, and I began to wonder what was going on. As I continued to walk, I noticed something that looked like a small fur ball a short distance in front of me, on the sidewalk. As I got closer, I saw that it was a baby seagull, folded into a ball, dead on the pavement. My heart sank when I saw him; I knew there was nothing I could do for him. I am not sure how he died, but his parents were panicked and in despair over the death of their baby. It did not appear to have been hit by a car or bitten to death by a dog (which I have seen several times in the past few months). The mother especially kept swooping down and ‘talking’ to the baby gull, perhaps in the hope that he would respond. I think she was also letting the world know that she had lost her baby, and she wanted us to pay attention, to give her the attention she so desperately wanted. The incident brought tears to my eyes. I spoke to the mother and told her that I could feel and hear her despair, because it was despair she was feeling. I acknowledged her despair. It occurred to me that we don’t always understand the animal and bird world; they are sentient beings and they understand death, especially the deaths of their young. It’s not often we are witness to such death, but it made me cry to see it.

Since the pandemic lockdown started, there are more birds that have found their way into the city and into the garden, seagulls especially. Perhaps this is due to the fact that there is very little ship and cruise traffic, such that there is not much food for them at sea. Seagulls are scavengers and eat a lot of the refuse and leftovers that ships leave in their wake. The reason for the increase in bird numbers remains unclear, but I know that I am sharing my daily life with more birds, which makes me happy. But I also know that they are at risk of being injured or killed in their interactions with humans, dogs, cats, and cars, and that there will probably be more deaths.

I thought about how I have been unable to really cry since my brother died five years ago. I cried a lot when I first got the news of his untimely and unexpected death. But in the months and years afterward, it’s been hard for me to cry. It’s not that I am not touched by what goes on around me, it’s just that I have not really been able to cry. It as though something in me wants to, but a numbing lid gets put on those feelings. I guess some of it is a protective reaction to being deeply hurt. But this past week, there was a news story about a five year old boy in England named Tony Hudgell, a double amputee (he has prosthetic legs) who was inspired by Captain Tom Moore, the 100-year-old veteran who raised thousands for the NHS by walking around his garden. Tony decided to challenge himself to walk a little each day to raise money for the NHS, and as of yesterday he had raised over £700,000 target. I watched the video of this brave little boy, and my heart went out to him. His pluckiness and persistence in the face of his odds made me cry. It took a little boy who has suffered incredibly, already at his young age, to make me cry. He lost his legs due to abuse suffered at the hands of his birth parents; he has since been adopted by good people. I despair at times at the injustice of life, that allows parents to do this to a child. I wanted to scoop him up into my arms and hug him, he is so cheerful and sweet. You can read more about him here:   https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-53066749

A young woman who used to work for me was diagnosed with lung cancer about five years ago. In the space of those five years, she has undergone surgery to remove the lung tumor, chemotherapy that weakened her permanently, radiotherapy, brain surgery to remove the few metastases that found their way to her brain, immunotherapy, and now radiotherapy again because the brain metastases have returned in large numbers. Following her initial brain surgery, she had to undergo physical therapy to help her learn to walk again. The immunotherapy has made her very sensitive to sound and to light. She does not have many months left on this earth, and this too makes me want to cry out in despair. She has been so brave through everything she has experienced; she has suffered quietly and has always had a positive and encouraging word for others when we have visited her. She and others I know who have terminal cancer, have shown me that it is possible to co-exist with the unfairness of their illnesses, but I still feel like screaming when I think of all that they go through and have gone through. I know there is little I can do for them, and that is perhaps also what bothers me. There has been and will continue to be, loss of loved ones due to illness or old age. I know this, and that is perhaps one of the reasons I have not been able to cry. I am steeling myself for these eventualities. But it is impossible to really do that. There is no way to shut out the feelings. I think I have been afraid of drowning in those feelings if I let them get the upper hand. So I have kept them under lock and key until this past week. They are no longer under lock and key.