Monday, May 6, 2013

A Spring Morning


I don’t have time to blog, but I cannot help myself this morning. :)

Spring is rushing to catch up, it is literally ‘popping’ before our eyes and ears. It is as if it has been held back behind a dam, but the gates have finally opened, and now, look out!, here it comes. I am used to being able to ‘hear the corn grow’ in the summer, but I think I can literally see and hear spring growing in front of me right now. 

I have been celebrating each bird that has come back, but yesterday I realized that I had not yet heard any wrens bubbling away. I always harbor a little worry that significant habitat destruction in wintering grounds will lead to a noticeable decrease in the spring return of my bird friends. However, not to be denied, this morning (before we had even opened the windows), my husband announced that he could hear wrens singing away. :) :) ("Thank you, Dick! I’m so glad your ears are better than mine. Diana, stop, stop, stop being such a worrier!")

And so just to show you that the universe is moving in sync this morning, I picked up a new book of Mary Oliver’s poetry at the library, could not resist looking in it before I had even left my parking space, so read just one poem where the book opened up. Here it is:

I Happened to be Standing

I don’t know where prayers go
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opposum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really 
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I being every morning.
Then a wren in a privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be 
if it isn’t a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air. 

~~ Mary Oliver, in A Thousand Mornings, ©2012

“positively drenched in enthusiasm”…………..I don’t know if I am a worrier by nature or if I have honed this characteristic by being such a long-time cancer survivor ……… but my dearest hope is that I can balance (and maybe even over-ride) my tendancy to worry, to be careful, to be preparing for or avoiding ‘trouble’ (like a truly awful case of poison ivy I currently have that came from nowhere in spite of all my appropriate precautions) with a sense of being alive, deeply alive, flying high plus “positively drenched with enthusiasm” like the house wren I heard this morning.

I am hopeful (am I sending a prayer?) and I would be honored and grateful if this wren decides to set up a home somewhere on my farm where I can hear it bubbling away all day, every day for the next several months, helping me remember the first poem I read from Mary Oliver’s book A Thousand Mornings.

I have had years where I have not been well, years when I have been in crisis mode, years where spring has come and gone and I have not had the energy or capacity to ‘be there’ to see it or feel it, to only know that I missed it.  My hope, my prayer, for you, my friends, is that spring has sprung, has burst, has popped right before your eyes and ears already, and that you are well enough this year to be right in with it as it is happening, and that spring, along with enthusiastic new hope, is happening within you, too.

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

2 comments:

Chez Nous Farms said...

Thank you!

Elaine said...

Thank you for sharing your hopes and prayers -- and yes, your worries, too. I can relate to all.

I love this post so much. I read it a few moments ago; now I must begin my workday. You have been my morning wren.

Thank you.