Five Weeks Almost

Ansel Adams

I'm worn out. I looked up synonyms for "depleted." Drained, sapped, impoverished, bankrupted. They all apply.

We went to a family wedding this past week-end, a beautiful event that went off without a hitch and was surely one of the most difficult celebrations I have ever endured.

I have to do some very much harder things in the next two weeks.

And somehow, as Lisa says, I have to continue to place one foot in front of another on the journey that goes from here to the new way of carrying it all.

For now,

I can't write publicly anymore. Cynthia says there is no comfort. And it is becoming impossible to describe a geography where the terrain is so desolate and the silence so immense.

I will let some of Mary Oliver's words, written after the death of her partner of many years, open the door to my hiatus. I am nowhere near the final verses that speak of laughter and admiration. Maybe someday. I am, I suppose, practicing.

********************

Heavy

~ by Mary Oliver

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God

had His hand in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel

(brave even among the lions),

"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it --

books, bricks, grief --

it's all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,

put it down."

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

the laughter

that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled --

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love to which there is no reply?