On days when my soul craves the healing balm of poetry, I find myself seeking solace in the words of Mary Oliver. Today has been one such day and the words Oliver strung together into the poem – The Moth, the Mountains, the Rivers – seep deep into spaces in need of the soothing embrace of  this sacred poetic language.

The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

by Mary Oliver

Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so

briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone
longing to be ground down, to be part again of
something livelier? Who can imagine in what
heaviness the rivers remember their original
clarity?

Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile
time with them. And I suggest them to you also,
that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life
be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as
you feel how it actually is, that we- so cleaver, and
ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained- are only
one design of the moving, the vivacious many.