While I was in treatment for cancer, I didn’t know if I was going to live or die, and neither did my doctors. During that time, so weak from the chemotherapy and radiation, anticipating two surgical procedures, and never knowing if all that suffering in the present was going to yield the desired result of surviving, I walked for 90 minutes every day. I got outside and I moved my feet. I can tell you that, during those walks, the blue of the sky and a bird’s dark underside contrasting with that blue when I looked up would make me cry, would make my knees buckle in wonder and gratitude. Life! It was so juicy and colorful! That experience, being singed by the Refiner’s Fire (a phrase I know from Handel’s Messiah, but that originally comes from the Bible, Malachi 3:2), everything burned away except gratitude and love, meant that I really saw, really heard everything.
At the end of my treatment, I weighed 85 pounds and was very diminished physically. But I was able to shuffle outside from my bedroom to a lawn chair on the deck outside. I will forever be grateful that my treatment ended in the middle of spring. I laid down on that lawn chair every day, and watched the vital, green world come alive around me. Hummingbirds, squirrels, one oak tree that I love like a treasured ancestor or a true beloved, the scent of the jasmine and the wisteria, the bees and butterflies, the hawks overhead, the blue sky, the cumulus puffs—the natural world pulled me out of the jaws of death and back into the land of the living. I felt inside my body the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” that poet Dylan Thomas wrote about. I had good doctors and a generous, loving family and community that supported me through everything; this was powerful medicine. But I found that music, poetry, and the natural world played a huge role too in saving my life. All three, with their ability to stir the soul and soften the heart, kept me connected to an essential aspect of the life force. I had always listened to music; in certain seasons of my life, I had played and sung a lot. Now I listened with a different sort of reverence and openness. I started reading poetry every day, started writing some. And I sought beautiful places where I could get outside.
After I recovered from treatment, I spent a year keeping an online Gratitude Journal. I was still seeing and hearing in a turbocharged kind of way (still am). I posted daily, noting something I was grateful for. Often, though not always, my post was a photo and a brief explanation or caption. If you get outside every day, and look, you’re going to find something wondrous. I loved this practice, and found it had a positive feedback loop effect on my life in a couple of ways—it encouraged noticing, seeing, observing, paying attention. When you do that, gifts and wonders abound. It also meant, if I had gone a couple of days without seeing something beautiful, without reading a poem or listening to music that really moved me, I would make it a point to get out and hike under the full moon, or take a longer walk than usual in a different woods. I would circle back to works that I adored and relied on—the fiddle tune “Dry and Dusty”; Satie’s Gnossienne no. 1; Aretha Franklin singing “Mary, Don’t You Weep;” Mary Oliver’s The Leaf And The Cloud; Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood; anything by John O’Donohue. All this great stuff that we, the living, get to see and hear and do. What unearned, abundant blessings!
That formalized incarnation of my Gratitude Project ended after a year, though I continue to remind myself to look and really see, to touch and really feel. I also continued my commitment to walking outdoors in beautiful places and to regularly reading poetry. Music has always been part of the picture for me. These activities inspire and allow me to leave behind a distanced, more analytical relationship to the world and really be one with a place, or to enter into the words of a poet or the music of an artist and to relish the feelings that those works can stir.
As I understand it, this is the idea behind lectio divina, the Benedictine monastic practice of entering, feeling scripture, not just reading and analyzing it. Lectio divina translates to “divine reading.” There are four parts to it: lectio (reading); meditatio (meditation on the passage); oratio (responding to the passage through prayer and blossoming of the heart); and contemplatio (contemplation through silent sitting; this last step is receptive—you’re not reaching for anything, but allowing an openness and reflection). It’s a way to sink into a text while you allow it to soak into you. I often find myself approaching the reading of poetry in this spirit.
There’s something about poetry. A good poem can make you think, sure, but the magic rests in how it stirs you, in how it makes you go, Oh, yes! It frees the heart in a very particular kind of way, articulating what hibernates in the nooks and crannies of your soul, suggesting shared experience, a hedge against the sense that you may be utterly alone in your feelings and perceptions.
Because I believe that the soul enlivens the trio of body-mind-heart, anything, like poetry, that moves you on a soul level will invigorate that triad. I think poetry is good medicine! Experiencing connectedness, sensing the oneness of all life, feeling your heart soften into broader understanding and more loving—that’s soul nourishment of the most nutritious kind.
Here are two poems that I just love (please forgive the wonky spacing; can’t figure out how to get Substack to let me do it the way I wanna do it):
Halleluiah
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
--Mary Oliver
I sometimes forget
that I was created for Joy.
My mind is too busy.
My Heart is too heavy
for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the Sacred dance of life.
I was created to smile
To Love
To be lifted up
And to lift others up.
O’ Sacred One
Untangle my feet
from all that ensnares.
Free my soul.
That we might
Dance
and that our dancing
might be contagious.
--Hafiz
And here’s a prose passage that feels very poetic to me:
There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below….Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat.
--Pema Chödrön
And one more, because Masahide rules:
Barn’s burnt down—
now
I can see the moon.
--Mizuta Masahide
The tale of the woman and the tigers and the vine is not new to me, but I was moved to find it here. I have yet to discover a story that more embodies the life-celebrating spirit of my own mother.