Sorrow on a Sunday in late February

Sunday morning began with a talk from Stephen Jenkinson, via zoom with 600 others, on ceremony and matrimony and marriage and the shoddy bits of patrimony still clinging to everything. He in his fine elderhood, barely older than me, cut like a sword and wept within and was so sad and beautiful all in his feral, crystalline, tender stillness and sorrow. All ferocity blooming from love. 

Sunday afternoon, I immersed myself in this poem and read it for others at a Memorial Service honoring the life of a woman amongst us. 

Adrift

by 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.

Afterwards, someone thanked me. I heard myself say the only thing possible to say which was “we are all so sad and everything is beautiful”. And what I meant was that we - in our older years - while seeing the beauty are also simply sad.

Except sad now means something different.
Sad used to be the sad of something lost - love, job, friend.

Sad was a visitor; a guest who I knew would leave eventually.

Sad felt more like tired. …

Sad now is sorrow.

Sorrow infuses my blood like oxygen.

I would feel silly without it.

Sorrow is seeing like an owl.

A silent owl in search of food sees what it must even in the dark.

It hurts to see so clearly, even in the dark.

So there is sorrow, like oxygen. 

For those curious:

Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberley Ann Johnson

Forgotten Pillars: Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors & Ceremony