“That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying
I went closer, and I did not die.
Surely God had his hand in this, as well as friends.
Still, I was bent, and my laughter, as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said a friend of mine: “It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it - books, bricks, grief - it’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not, put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard the laughter that comes, now and again, out of my startled mouth?
How I linger to admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe
also troubled.
How I feel a love again to which there is no reply?”
Mary Oliver
