Quotes from 2023

The past year has been hard.  Since his fall two winters ago, Kit and I have been on an arduous journey that continues to have its physical and cognitive ups and downs.  While hope remains for progress on all fronts, his age is increasingly a factor in his recovery.   As I sit down to write my first blog of 2024, I find myself drawn to writers who have moved me and bolstered my spirits after visits to the Lodge where Kit now resides. 

Wendell Berry’s quiet poem “The Peace of Wild Things” reminds me of where to go to find peace in times when the weight of the world and Kit’s struggles press down on my spirit.

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great
heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
- Wendell Berry

Early each morning, I walk to the spot along my meditation pathway where I scatter bird seed, kernels of corn and peanuts in assorted feeders.   In the hours between daily visits with Kit, I return home to recharge.  It’s often then that birds, squirrels, and deer gather to feed.  When I witness their visits through our dining room window, I rest for a while in the grace of their peaceful world.

A poem by Emily Dickinson reminds me of the connection I feel to each tiny bird that warms my spirits with its hopeful song.

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
- Emily Dickinson

On days when I walk alone in the forest, the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson remind me of the healing nature of silence.  Surrounded by a cathedral of tall pines, my mind quiets.  I am aware only of the sound of my footsteps on a path of pine needles.  In the balm of silence that nature provides, I am whole and alive.   

“Within us
is the soul of the whole,
the wise silence,
the universal beauty, the eternal One.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Four months ago, Kit almost died. During the three weeks Kit spent in the ICU and hospital, he continued to amaze the hospitalist who was on call the night Kit arrived in the ER.  As his organs struggled to survive and repair, Kit’s positive spirit filled his body and mind with energy and healing light.  Since returning to the Lodge, his road to regain mobility has been long and hard.  The message on a get-well card sent by his niece Annie last September describes how I felt during that particularly low time. 

“Life status:  Currently holding it all together with one bobby pin.” 

Where are we on our journey as 2024 gets underway?  We cannot change the fact that the brain trauma Kit suffered from his initial fall, subsequent hospitalizations, and age have all taken a toll on Kit’s once boundless energy.  We now take life a day at a time.  We resolve not to make unrealistic demands on ourselves as we go forth. 

“You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
- Mary Oliver

And, from British author Richard Osmond novel “The Last Devil to Die”—book four in his Thursday Murder Club Mystery series—comes a quote that reminds me to treasure each day and moment that I have with Kit, in sickness and in health, for as long as that may be.

“We all come from the stars, and we all return to the stars. But however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears.  When the man you love with every fiber starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.” - Richard Osmond