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In a previous episode (episode 9) I shared a recent synchronicity I experienced involving a Mary Oliver poem. In this week’s episode I share yet another synchronicity I had recently with one of Oliver’s poems.
Since this lastest poem showed up, I have been listening in more deeply to Oliver’s instruction to “live your life,” and how it relates to this global shift we are undergoing in which the patterns of the past are no longer applicable.
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Transcription
Hello, beautiful souls, and welcome to this week’s podcast episode.
A few weeks ago, I shared a synchronicity that I had with a poem by Mary Oliver, a little snippet of a poem. And it showed up in my life three times, very, you know, synchronistically, over the matter of just a few days, and I had a similar experience with another Mary Oliver poem. I’ll share with you the context.
As I mentioned, in the previous podcast, every morning, one of the first things I do is before I sit down to do my journaling, I read a poem, often by Mary Oliver. And I have pretty much I believe, all of her books, and I just read through them, poem by poem. I don’t flip through them, I read through them sequentially. And I always read one, and then I move to the next poem the next day, and the next poem the next day, and so on.
Well, a couple weeks ago, I read one of the poems, and I thought, wow, I think I need to read that poem again. So I left my bookmark on that page, to revisit the poem the following day, which is something that I hardly ever do. And then lo and behold, that same poem is sent out by the organizers of this writers salon that I belong to. They send out words of inspiration every day, and they don’t usually send Mary Oliver poems. In fact, these are the only two that I recall. And sure enough, there was this same poem, again, that I had been drawn to read twice, two days in a row.
So I’m going to read it to you. And I would like you to just listen in, because I often believe that, you know, when we’re experiencing something personal, it also can have applications for other people, and that this poem has landed in my life with such insistence makes me think that there’s something in here for a lot of other people as well. So here is the poem.
For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.
And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
So that was the poem that asserted itself. So I’ve listened in and just to inquire what is it about this poem that feels so important to me personally, and I think probably for a lot of us collectively. And clearly, in this poem, Mary Oliver is beckoning us to really attend and to be present to life, and to taste it fully.
And she ends there with that line “and live your life.” And I’m so aware that so often, we don’t live our lives we are, as I’ve said before, and you know, we all know this, we go through our days oftentimes very distracted, and we can get through the day, to the end of the day and realize that we didn’t actually live the day. We just got the day done.
So this poem is beckoning me to more and more fully sink into the present, the present moment of my life, and to live my life. And the other inflection of that last line for me has been and live your life.
And I want to really delve into that with us because we, as I’ve spoken of so many times, and the purpose of this podcast is to help us navigate this time of transition of consciousness. And a lot of the former ways and patterns and expectations are falling away, and we are stepping into new ways of being.
And it can be a little challenging because we’re still sort of beholden to patterns of the past and believing that we’re supposed to live in a certain way. But that certain way of the past is no longer applicable. And it’s time for us to let the past be the past, as Oliver says.
And one of the ways that this has been playing out in my life is, you know, we hear about bucket lists, and what is your bucket list? And I have sat with that question. And I, I do not have a bucket list. And that’s been kind of a problem for me. I’ve felt like, oh, there’s something wrong, I don’t have a bucket list. I don’t have all of, you know, a list of all of these external adventures that I want to go on or anything. I just don’t have that kind of ambition. I don’t want to skydive. I just don’t have a bucket list.
And as I’ve listened in, I realized, well, I think what it is, is my bucket list doesn’t have to do with the external world. It doesn’t have to do with experiences in the external world or adventures. My bucket list is an inner bucket list. My bucket list is all about a state of being. My bucket list is about being my being in the world.
And I believe that this is part of the shift that we’re experiencing, as we move away from more masculine or yang kinds of ways, into the rise of the feminine, into more and more emphasis on being, that we are making this shift from an emphasis on doing to an emphasis on being. And that can be a bit of a challenge for us, because we are so indoctrinated and acculturated to believe that the quality of our life is all about our doing. And it’s all about our accomplishments in the world.
But that is the past, and we can let that past be past. Because what is arising now is a way of being. We are coming into the fullness of our being. And it is from that beingness that action arises, that all of our activities arise out of that state of being. And more and more as I travel on my own spiritual journey, it doesn’t even feel like travel at this point, I would say sink more and more into my spiritual essence, I understand that the heart for me is where it’s at.
And the heart for me is the source of wisdom. The heart for me, is the source of my own inner guidance. It is that radiant joy that I feel within myself. And that if I’m trying to express things or create things, decoupled from that experience of the heart, or that radiance of the heart, then those expressions and those creations are not, they don’t have the life, they don’t have the love. They don’t have the vibrancy or the radiance that they would have if they were coupled with the radiance of the heart.
And a phrase that came to me recently was, trying to express without it coming from the heart, or trying to express and create or do things in our lives without first centering and letting ourselves resting the heart, is like getting the cart ahead of the horse. And then I realized, well, no, it’s more like getting the art ahead of the source. That the heart and the Beingness, our own intrinsic beingness, is the source of our creative expressions and our ways of doing and acting in the world.
So to live, your life is both to live your life, to be present to your life as it is, letting the past be the past, and also to live your life. Not according to other people’s expectations or the cultural expectations or trying to, to live up to certain standards that we’ve all sort of been indoctrinated with, but to live your life, the life that arises from the core of your being from the core of your knowing, which is in your heart center. That is where you find it. That is where you access it and it is from that heart center that you and I can live our lives truly, fully and radiantly.
So before I close, I would like to just read this Mary Oliver poem one more time, so that it can really sink in, and you can take it with you in this coming week. Here it is.
For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.
And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.