the deepening ground

Summer is in full bloom! The temperature promises to hit the 90s next week and I have put away (most of) my educational responsibilities for a season. Even the band began a two-week hiatus today after last night’s block party as we all take time to enjoy visiting family and the celebration of America’s 250th birthday. This is the slow of summer prior to the late summer frenzy that begins mid-August. If only I could take this pace of life with me into the school year, what a difference that would be!

And yet the offer to carry this pace, this peace, with me throughout the year remains. My failure to do so is nothing more than a choice. Perhaps I take on too much or I pick up yokes and responsibilities that are not mine to bear (or not mine to bear alone). Therefore, Mary Oliver’s poem comes like a gentle reminder to choose patience, to “stand in the woods // and study the patterns / of the moon shadows” rather than “hurry[ing] everywhere,” chasing after the wind. Better to learn now what the bones will learn all too soon!

Patience
by MaRY OLIVER

What is the good life now? Why,
look here, consider
the moon’s white crescent

rounding, slowly, over
the half month to still another
perfect circle–

the shining eye
that lightens the hills,
that lays down the shadows

of the branches of the trees,
that summons the flowers
to open their sleepy faces and look up

into the heavens.
I used to hurry everywhere,
and leaped over the running creeks.

There wasn’t
time enough for all the wonderful things
I could think of to do

in a single day. Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart

as another good idea.
I say this
as I stand in the woods

and study the patterns
of the moon shadows,
or stroll down into the waters

that now, late summer, have also
caught the fever, and hardly move
from one eternity to another.