“Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart”
~ Mary Oliver
I’ve been thinking about patience this week.
In my younger years, I tended to be very impatient with God. I figured there was no reason I shouldn’t just be enlightened because I wanted to be! What’s all this practice stuff?
Maybe it’s part of eldering to finally notice that where you are is where you need to be. The beauty of each moment, each prayer, each exchange with our human and more than human beloveds, and indeed each breath is a gift and is enough.
In this beautiful season of change, I am reminded by the leaves turning to gold and red, to treasure each gift of each day before I fall into that final dance back to the earth.
One of the 99 names or aspects of the Divine in the Sufi/Islamic tradition is Muqaddim. It reminds us that everything is happening in its own time and in perfect sequence. Using that as a mantra has helped to inculcate the sense that I can let go of the feeling that anything needs to be pushed. Like the old gestalt book reminded us, “Don’t Push the River.”
Sitting beside the creek at my sit spot, and praying that mantra, I physically notice myself letting go and remembering patience, with myself, with God, and with others.
St Mary Oliver (of course) has a beautiful poem to help us feel this even more:
What is the good life now? Why,
look here, consider
the moon’s white crescent
rounding, slowly, over
the half month to still another
perfect circle–
the shining eye
that lightens the hills,
that lays down the shadows
of the branches of the trees,
that summons the flowers
to open their sleepy faces and look up
into the heavens.
I used to hurry everywhere,
and leaped over the running creeks.
There wasn’t
time enough for all the wonderful things
I could think of to do
in a single day. Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart
as another good idea.
I say this
as I stand in the woods
and study the patterns
of the moon shadows,
or stroll down into the waters
that now, late summer, have also
caught the fever, and hardly move
from one eternity to another.
~Patience by Mary Oliver .
Lovely! In my experience, having (for now) the blessing of good health as I move into the eldering years, there is an appetite to “do it all now while I still can.” Letting go and learning patience with the pace at which all I desire in my life comes to me or doesn’t come is the great lesson, staying present to the tremendous gift in every moment, loving the Haqq, the rightness and beauty of what is in front of me and inside me now and now and now… ya Sabur… Big love to you, my friend.