Some lines from my mother

Mary Oliver is so familiar and so soothing after this terrible last week and our fears for the future of our one precious world.
You can go to the web link for the whole poem.

Right now I most love the lines:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what  I have been doing all day,
Tell me, what else should I have done?

Here is a quote from an article on idleness in this month's Harper's:

   It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls me. There's such a lovely perversity to it; it's so wonderfully counterintuitive so very Christian. You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and all the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way.  You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then --- because even this is not enough --- you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good . . . .

And finally:

A poet is someone
who can pour light into a cup
and then raise it to nourish your beautiful
---perhaps parched---holy mouth

                                          Hafiz