Resilience at 50 -- of Messengers and Wild Geese (Mary Oliver)

I've just been to a special birthday celebration for a friend, and I was contemplating the large number of years she has lived.  We've lived quite a long time, I'll say out loud, and there are some significant things to celebrate here.  As I mentioned last week, I had a chance to think about limits as they pertain to yoga, and I've had several weeks to let that percolate into the gray matter a bit.  Everyone I know who is almost 50 or over has had to confront, at some time or another, a limit.  We've all had to deal with some issue or other that limits us in some way--a joint, a disease, an ending, a significant change....

As I thought about what I might say to my dear friend who has worked so hard and come head-on against her limits in many ways, I realized that her scars have taught her so much.  Perhaps this is the whole point. We all have issues we bang our heads against, or that flatten us for awhile, and we either learn to stand again and find some resilience, or we are in trouble.  What are these components of resilience, I wonder?  Clearly, it is easier to be resilient if we have each other, spouses, significant others, dear friends, hope.  But there is more to it, I think.  I don't know the answers, I just have some hunches.  I've seen incredible resilience in many survivors I work with, and I've seen the reverse.  For me, having poetry in my life has given me a new way of being resilient.  I can feel pain and hopelessness and worry for the future in so many poems, and I find new ways of understanding and dealing with these issues by submerging myself in the poems-- soaking up their pain, their way of seeing, their ability to feel gratitude, their ability to move forward.  And, thank goodness, I can try my hand at telling a story of resilience, and this is always illuminating for me.  I know my friend knows what I mean, as she begins to pick up her paintbrushes again.  She has become very wise.  For all of her struggles and recovery, I am very grateful; I know she is too.  Wisdom, resilience, gratitude....these are things I would really like to have in my life as I age. May all of us have them!  Try these two from Mary Oliver and don't forget to hear her speak in April here in Cleveland.

Messenger

By Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.