Last night drove through to a small town in the Welsh hills for a meeting. An opportunity to say goodbye and thank you to the lovely warm people whom I have come to know over the course of this summer. I was asked to open the meeting and chose to speak about gratitude.
That gifted and prophetic poet Mary Oliver writes somewhere:
‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’
This life is singular, it is the only life we may know in this incarnation or in all eternity. When we are drinking ourselves into oblivion we lose sight of not only the unique and irreplaceable dimension of our own life but the lives around us. We lose sight of the wild and precious.
I am so grateful that I stopped drinking before I died. However painful or topsy-turvy or fraught my life may be now, it is the only life I shall know on this earth and it has become whole and wild and precious to me.
As we drove back after the meeting, an enormous bone-white moon came up over the low hills of the Brecon Beacon and I felt quite breathless and shivery with joy. The man in the back of the car who was getting a lift had been drinking during the day and was rambling on, full of excuses and stuck in that deformed false self of the active alcoholic. He could not see that moon even when we pointed it out to him. How could the moon help him with his broken marriage and his debts, his feelings of being misunderstood and all alone in the universe and with only the bottle of vodka behind the sofa when he got home?
This one wild and precious life is not mine alone. It is a life that only thrives in relationship, in connectedness.
Earlier in the day, I had made my farewell journey to Hereford to meet with a younger woman and we had sat in the cathedral coffee bar under great gothic arches of sculpted stone and gleaming marble slabs with the epitaphs in Latin, talking about her work in alternative spiritualities, the journey into the wilder places. She is working in a spiritual partnership with another woman, creating rituals for healing and transformation. Staying grounded, wanting to be of use, working to build community and empower others. As I listened, her path so different from mine and yet so similar, the question came to me again:
‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’
And my life itself seemed surrendered and given over, open to the unknowable. The trust fiilling me with possibilities. My own (broken) heart beating like some wild bird against the high stained windows of that ancient cathedral, the quiet light falling on us both like a blessing. I could hear my inner self asking of the unknown: Let me never forget you, my miracle of restored life, let me never forget to be grateful.
Mary Oliver again, just briefly.
‘When it’s over, I want to say
all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.’
I needed to hear this.
I am so sorry to hear about your relationship and that you are leaving. I’ve been reading back through your blog tonight and it has helped me immensely. Thankyou, I wish you well, you are strong and I understand where your strength comes from and how fragile such strength is. I have only recently realised the same in me. God Bless you (and me)
cool.
thanks for sharing this.
“I could hear my inner self asking of the unknown: Let me never forget you, my miracle of restored life, let me never forget to be grateful.”
This resonates within me, so loud and clear.
Thank you.