Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Sometimes the Only Life You Can Save is Your Own


Yesterday I was sitting in my car in a grocery store parking lot when I thought, "I've got to get home to feed my koi." I never imagined that one day it would seem somehow necessary to dig a pond, gather guppies and water plants, ask a friend to help craft a waterfall, install a pump and finally to take my youngest daughter to select some young koi for a pond that I never thought I'd create in the first place.

But that was then, and this is now. And now, to my own surprise, I have become strangely obsessed with this pond, which is not one hundred percent complete just yet. I am still gathering stones for one side of it, scouring our woods for the perfect stones and then turning them and re-turning them until the sides fit together perfectly and securely, like a giant puzzle for grown-ups. I'm zealous enough for the pond that my kids have caught me out in the pouring rain gathering stones, when I should be doing other things (like starting dinner). My twelve-year-old stares out the window at her mom, dripping wet from the rain, lava stones stacked in my mud spattered arms, and says, "Seriously, mom?" While my seven-year-old prefers to lay down the law, "You may not work on the pond today," she says, when I pick her up from school.

This pond came about fairly recently. Over the past few years, we have come into contact with several people in difficult situations. Sometimes we couldn't do anything, but when we could, we tried, and sometimes it has seemed that the more love and resources we poured into people, the less they liked us in the end. After another situation went awry, I sighed deeply and thought, "All  that's left to do now is build a pond."

This past weekend my childhood friend Katy visited. Katy and I grew up together, building mud pies along the banks of Minnehaha Creek, and on Monday I took her on a whirlwind tour of the Big Island. She's now a college professor, and she told me that sometimes she asks her students to visualize how their lives will be after they graduate. They tend toward unreasonably high expectations, and sometimes she feels the need to warn them, "As you get older, you realize that life is often really disappointing," she tells them. "Sometimes you get the thing you most wanted only to discover that the reality is so different from what you imagined."

In other cases,  life takes an unexpected turn--the death of a loved one, a divorce, financial hardship, anything you might labor to build in your adult life only to have it crumble before your eyes--sometimes life ends up looking nothing like the way you hoped. Nothing like. Somehow we have to find ways to integrate those experiences, too.

And so, at least in my own life, my essential discovery has been so very basic: sometimes the only life you can save is your own. I still believe in intense, loving, engagement with the world, and in sheltering others in whatever way you can: by providing food or shelter (when possible) a listening ear, or even just looking out with wide open eyes and compassion: trying to see others as they are (which is of course also as we are, almost unbearably vulnerable and easily in need, despite illusions of security). As Mother Teresa said, "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each another."

But sometimes, it is this very belonging to others that I must retreat from, at least for a time. Sometimes all that's left to do is dig a pond (or light a candle or draw up a bath or cry until all tears are spent) or just to do anything you can do to create a quiet place to rest and wait and watch and recover. For me at least, it's at the edge of this pond where I begin to see clearly again. Even in the face of so many irreconcilables, there are the koi, swimming purposefully, fins like wings, strokes full of flight.

The Journey

One day you finally knew 
what you had to do, and began, 
though the voices around you 
kept shouting their bad advice-- 
though the whole house 
began to tremble 
and you felt the old tug at your ankles. 
"Mend my life!" each voice cried. 
But you didn't stop. 
You knew what you had to do, 
though the wind pried 
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations, 
though their melancholy was terrible. 
It was already late 
enough, and a wild night, 
and the road full of fallen 
branches and stones. 
But little by little, 
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn 
through the sheets of clouds, 
and there was a new voice 
which you slowly 
recognized as your own, 
that kept you company 
as you strode deeper and deeper 
into the world, 
determined to do 
the only thing you could do-- 
determined to save 
the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver


P.S. If you love this poem, buy the book, Dream Work. You won't be disappointed.

3 comments:

  1. jenny i love this and also mary oliver poem. she is one of my fovorite writers. thank you for sharing it. sometimes the realities of life can be so unexpected really they shouldnt be we are all so human afterall.

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  2. Dear Paula,

    Thank you for always being there, and for your comments here. I am blessed to know you!

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