Dear Reader:

I had heard of the poet, Mary Oliver, earlier in her career, but I didn’t immerse myself into her poetry until rather recently in life.

I thought the title photo visually defined two lines from her poetry which reads:

“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?”

This line comes from one of her more recent poems called “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac” (Part 3).

The fourth sign of the zodiac is cancer. This poem (which has four parts) deals with Oliver’s diagnosis of lung cancer and her own mortality. It is found in her book of poetry titled: Blue Horses.

The truth is…most of us do need a prod or a scare sometime in our life to wake us up to the life we have been missing. We have become lost in the misty mundane routines of life, missing out on the beauty and gifts God lays before us each day.

Let me share each of the four parts of the poem: The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac…because each part spoke volumes for me and I think it will for you. .

Part 1:

Why should I have been surprised?

Hunters walk the forest without a sound.

The hunter, strapped to his rifle,

the fox on his feet of silk, 

the serpent on his empire of muscles-

all move in a stillness, 

hungry, careful, intent

Just as the cancer

entered the forest of my body

without a sound.

Why are we surprised when we learn we have a challenging health problem and especially when it is potentially life-threatening?(Particularly if the problem deals with an heredity disposition or brought on by unhealthy habits over an extended period of time)

Yet we always are…we walk away from the doctor’s office like a deer in headlights…stunned and temporarily paralyzed in our cognitive capabilities to process it…Am I going to die? These things happen to other people…not me.

Oliver is right in her metaphor that cancer is a silent predator…who “enters the forest of our bodies without a sound.”

Part 2:

The question is,
what will it be like
after the last day?
Will I float
into the sky
or will I fray
within the earth or a river—
remembering nothing?
How desperate I would be
if I couldn’t remember
the sun rising, if I couldn’t
remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t
even remember, beloved,
your beloved name.

As soon as the initial shock wears off of us…our thoughts do turn to the unknown. Is there another world out there waiting for me and will I see my loved ones again and remember those who went before and those I leave behind?

Part 3:

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Don’t we all, at different times in our lives, think we are invincible and will live forever? And not just in our teenage (immortal) years but even later as we get caught up in society’s definition of a day in our life….fixing meals, getting kids off to school, going to work, fixing more meals, shopping, attending meetings and community functions, and then repeating it over and over.

*Keats was only twenty-five when he died…leaving us devoid of this wonderful God-given talent of prose he possessed.

Part 4:

Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,
all the fragile blue flowers in bloom
in the shrubs in the yard next door had
tumbled from the shrubs and lay
wrinkled and fading in the grass. But
this morning the shrubs were full of
the blue flowers again. There wasn’t
a single one on the grass. How, I
wondered, did they roll back up to
the branches, that fiercely wanting,
as we all do, just a little more of
life?

I think we can all associate with the fierce desire to continue living when we are fighting our hardest to do so. So many times in my garden I have witnessed stems or blooms or a plant itself, dried up and withered beyond recognition….only to see it days or months later…more beautiful than ever before. Everyone and everything wants to live.

*I am happy to let you know (in case you didn’t) that Mary Oliver is now in her early eighties and (thus far) appears to have beaten her lung cancer.

I’d like to leave the blog post today with this final thought by Oliver:

” I don’t want to end up simply having visited the world.”

So until tomorrow….Father remind us each day to get our hands in the dirt, give someone a hug, laugh a lot, and hold hands with each other… when facing the challenges life presents.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

*Update: Nancy, Anne’s sister, was unable to have the surgery yesterday to remove some nodules/lymph glands…her pulse rate was too high and the doctors didn’t want to take any chances. Hopefully she can try again soon….but do continue keeping Nancy, Anne, and the family in your prayers. Another unexpected “bend in the road.”