As happens on pilgrimage, life reveals things both beautiful, AND burdensome. Pilgrimage affords one opportunities to feel both energized and enervated. Mark Nepo, in his usual provocative poetry, seizes on this notion, in “Adrift.” And, as I pedal across southern Michigan with this poem in my back pocket, I am feeling and experiencing it all, pedaling with the two wheels of wonder and grief. This is truly luxurious, and hard. What a gift!
May you, too, be “punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything” today.
ADRIFT
~Mark Nepo
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.