Good morning!

As we begin the day, and especially in light of the heavy and difficult post I wrote yesterday, I wanted to take a break and share something that popped up on my timeline on Facebook, from 2012.

I was going through a difficult time, then, and was trying to reinvent myself. I had just rediscovered the Unitarian Church, a humanist fellowship, without dogma, whose belief in the “interdependent web of all existence” is a favorite concept of mine, and I had started walking every morning from where I lived in the Paseo Arts District of Oklahoma City, to the First Unitarian Church.

The steeple of First UU in Oklahoma City. Image taken from their website.

I’d been gifted a UU Hymnal from the Unitarian Church in Norman, where I’d first discovered Unitarian Universalism – my boyfriend at the time was a piano player (much better than I was) and we’d been given the hymnal in the hopes that he might play for the church on any given Sunday. He didn’t, but when we parted ways, he left the hymnal behind. Only a year or so later, and I’d be opening it again, and start poring through its pages every day, posting quotes and readings online as often as I could, in an effort to channel more positivity in my life, and send gratitude out to the Universe (thank you, Louise Hay)… hoping to find healing for the challenges I’d been facing that had broken my spirit.

The following poem, written by Mary Oliver, and first published in Dream Work (1986), doesn’t appear in the hymnal, but was read aloud from the pulpit at the beginning of one of the services I attended at First Unitarian, in Oklahoma City.

In the midst of the other poems and readings I’d been posting on Facebook, I posted this poem, exactly five years ago, today.

Every morning
the world
is created. 
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.