Forever in the Stream

In the Fall my appetite leads me away from  prose and seeks out verse. As the earth turns brown and the trees turn red and gold, it feels natural to reach for the kaleidoscopic lens of poetry. The poets Mary Oliver and T.S. Eliot are personal favorites – her love of nature and living  and the cadences of Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Murder in the Cathedral” and other poems. I feel the rhythms of the poor people of Canterbury as they mirror  persons left behind in our world.  What can I do to better understand Eliot’s powerful cycle of life (renewal) and death? How can I walk in the woods seeing with Mary Oliver’s eyes? Eliot and Oliver’s words are written in my heart especially now at this time.

I just bought Mary Oliver’s new book called “Upstream.” It is filled with essays written with the poet’s touch. It is a delight, because she is both  seer and  wisdom seeker. She has a phrase that catches my attention.  She writes: “Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the wind-flower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect? I like the line “may I stay forever in the stream.” I find it easy to keep my eye on the living of life – the waves as they come one right after another and the to-do list which both liberates and binds me. Staying in the stream allows us to see where we are and not where we have been or where we are going. Poets live in the now. It is where they see the world.

I’ve been distracted these past months and perhaps filled with anxiety and fear about our world. However, there is something which connects me to the universe. I am that “tiniest of nails.” I am put gently back into the stream of life. It is prayer. My prayers in the morning are guided by prayers which have sprung out of the Book of Common Prayer. They are liturgical prayers of thanksgiving and intercession. A new day has begun.  And my prayers at the end of the day are quiet meditations on my animals and the preciousness of human life. Every evening I am thankful-touching the fur of my sweet cat of almost 15 years-who is blind and my two wild cats “born of the woods in New York.” I pray for all animals and all people who were made whole. I pray for all who live in war and loneliness. This evening prayer grounds me in a way like poetry does. For a moment I am Eliot’s people and Oliver’s nature. I am praying for all people–Aleppo, Yemen, Gaza, Sudan and the whole globe and especially all people near their final hours. Wherever I have been that day I am “forever in the stream.”