Sacred Places

It’s time for another Mary Oliver poem as part of my lunar calendar. It’s also time for an apology.

Every time I mention a new poem from the calendar, I include a link to the original post, which explains what I’m doing and why, and lists the schedule for the entire year. On September 30th, when I wrote about the previous poem, I realized the link—which I’ve been copying and pasting most of the year—was bad. Rather than leading to the original post, it simply goes back to our Website’s main page. I had to fix the link in all of the posts back to early April. I think they’re all correct now. I’m really sorry if this caused confusion.

At any rate, the poem for today’s first quarter moon in my time zone, perhaps tomorrow in yours, is At Blackwater Pond.

Blackwater pond must be Mary Oliver’s Sacred Place. She refers to it often in her poetry. It seems to be the place she goes to transcend herself, to meld, as fully as possible, with Nature. This aspect of her poetry is probably what attracts me most to her work. As one who identifies and cherishes Sacred Places, I appreciate someone with the talent to so beautifully express the thoughts and feelings one can experience in such places.

Ironically, in what has been a wet autumn for the most part, today’s poem does not match our weather. Yesterday and today have been gloriously clear. The slanting autumnal sunlight on the changing leaves, on the fresh snow on the mountains, and on the water is intoxicating, invigorating, restorative.

Of course, we’re scrambling to take advantage of the break. Particularly, we have finally been able to clean our chimney. I’ve had this task on my list all last summer, when we had many opportunities, but somehow its urgency didn’t raise it to top priority until it appeared to be too late. We’ve had a fire now for part of most days since returning from our trip south. The good weather gave us the break we needed to perform this important chore yesterday. We squared ourselves away and got ‘er done before lunch. Which was a good thing, because as I secured the chimney top, all heck broke loose out on the water. I’ll explain another time, but suffice it to say that the incident reconfirmed our homestead’s status as our most Sacred Place.

This entry was posted in Philosophy and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *