Sunday, January 18, 2009

Solar Plexus



Busy, busy, busy...The best thing for a Sunday really seems to be plenitude, the sense that there is not merely enough for us, but more than we could possibly take in; and plenitude ought to lead naturally to gratitude. Five billion years old, and still blazing away with appalling violence, cushioned to a caress by distance and atmosphere.

So I leave you with this poem I like from Mary Oliver:

The Sun


Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

When it is so cold and dark this time of year it is easy to forget that such incomprehensible radiance is there, where it always was, for us.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Psychopathic killers come out to play in summer.

Novalis said...

Not to mention mosquitos.

Odd--when I wrote this I wasn't thinking of winter as a metaphorical three month solar eclipse, but so it is.

therapydoc said...

Ah! A poem I can understand!