On the Unbearable Weight of Ecstasy

Or, how poetry continues to save me.

Grieving a loon lying dead at a lakeshore, Mary Oliver writes, “I tell you this / to break your heart, / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.”

Today, with its red paper hearts and swollen flower bouquets and cheeky greeting cards, it’s a bright and loud celebration of love, and those things are beautiful and wonderful and absolutely deserve celebrating. But sometimes, love weighs so heavily in your body it feels as though your lungs were packed with wet sand. Sometimes, the overwhelm of small and fleeting moments pierces like the tiniest shards of glass, aching invisibly when pressed with a memory or a lingering hug.

Sometimes, the promise of long years ahead doesn’t feel like enough, because it’s not forever. Nothing can be forever, and so we cling to these moments where we’re known, where we’re seen for who we are, where we can breathe in the storms of other lives and know and see them, too. Our partners, our children, our parents. The friend who’s seen you at your worst and loves you wholeheartedly still. The stranger at the grocery store who shares an honest and vulnerable smile.

And beyond that, it’s the wind that creeps down the neck of your jacket, raising goosebumps with the scrape of its teeth. It’s the drive-by kiss of a hummingbird before it swoops off, spider silk tucked in its beak. It’s the way concrete splits around the insistence of a root, or a sky so blue it hurts to look at, or the writhe of an earthworm in a robin’s relentless beak.

This is a day for love, but what is the world, if not love embodied in every soft palm and smear of dirt and setting sun? And you, yes You, are loved by it in return. Break open, dear heart, and let the ache trickle through your limbs. And if joy is too far away for you, then sink into the heartbreak and know that it’s just the other side of the same coin.

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Poems or Poets I’ve in love with right now:

Joy Sullivan (whose book Instructions for Travelling West comes out in April), writes:

“…the truth of the matter is we’re all up against the clock. It makes everything simple and urgent: there’s only time to turn toward what you truly love. There’s only time to leap.”

Maggie Smith, who wrote You Could Make This Place Beautiful, an exquisite memoir on divorce and truth, writes:

“Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect. We all come into the world less than done, unfinished, our skulls still stitching themselves together. All wax and feathers, a mess of hope.”

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One more piece of news: I’m giving a presentation on writing realistic characters at the Sidney/North Saanich library on Thursday, February 29th. It’s free to attend, and it’ll be half lecture, half workshop, so drop by if you can!