What to do when the fabric and texture of our world changes? When everyone I dearly love poses a risk? Every. One.
The shaking, the full stop, uncharted ground for many and many have known a version of this place.
Diagnosis, divorce, disownment, refugee, assault, death. Humanity lives on razors edge.
Here we perch together.
I am sorry my children and I am sorry friends. And I am sorry to those who find it difficult to take a next step.
Because the next step, just one step is all we have. Do this moment. Take that next breath.
In January of 2009 sitting on the ferry boat in Puget Sound I was sobbing out of control. Too much loss. Way too much. Divorce pending, finances a complete loss, parents disavowed, children scrambled, home for sale.
Driving off the boat to finish my education was paramount. I couldn’t see to drive.
God help me.
Do the next thing.
Still crying I picked up the box of books for class….
Decades ago, as a teenager in a small midwestern town in 1978 I went on a field trip to the big city of Des Moines, Iowa to visit an art gallery.
My heart was just beginning a long slow process of warming to a Love never known.
And there was a print of Jules Breton’s Song of the Lark painted in 1884. A peasant woman gazing across the field with a look that pierced some longing place within. Hot tears, foreign to me, streamed down my cheeks.
An artist living 100 years before my time validated the ache long carried, her gaze held hope for something more.
That day I could afford a post card. In time, I bought a copy and all its loveliness hung in my home.
Now, thirty years later on the ferry when there was no possible way forward, I opened a box of textbooks to find Jules Breton’s painting on David Whyte’s book of poems. Shaking, I opened the first page to read… “…..This silence is the seed in her of everything she knows, and though falling from her body to the ground from which she comes, it finds a hidden place to grow. And rises and flowers in old wild places, where the dark edge sickle can not go.”
David Whyte put words to what I felt so long ago and once again Love saw me.
I was not alone. And if I am not alone, there is hope. Hope was all needed to take the next step.
On this day, March 19, 2020 dear ones we are not alone.
Love is real and ever present.
Do that one next thing.
Nita Baer 2020
Song of the Lark by David Whyte
The song begins and the eyes are lifted
but the sickle points toward the ground,
its downward curve forgotten in the song she hears,
while over the dark wood, rising or falling,
the sun lifts on cool air, the small body of a singing lark.
The song falls, the eyes raise, the mouth opens
and her bare feet on the earth have stopped.
Whoever listens in this silence, as she listens,
will also stand opened, thoughtless, frightened
by the joy she feels, the pathway in the field
branching to a hundred more, no one has explored.
What is called in her rises from the ground
and is found in her body,
what she is given is secret even from her.
This silence is the seed in her
of everything she is
and falling through her body
to the ground from which she comes,
it finds a hidden place to grow
and rises, and flowers, in old wild places,
where the dark-edged sickle cannot go.
— David Whyte from River Flow: New & Selected Poems