“My work is loving the world.” Mary Oliver
"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." Rainer Maria Rilke
"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” Rainer Maria Rilke
“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
Five A.M. in the Pinewoods - by Mary Oliver
I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I
got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under
the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.
This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them - I swear it! -
would have to come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pin needles like
the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,
I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.
