Heavy

I've gone off my Facebook account for awhile, and who knows where I'm going with this blog?  I am grappling with depression and just want to shut down completely.  The activity of FB and the internet are too much for me now.  I have a referral to a therapist with a Buddhist bent, and I look forward to starting that work with him.  I have knee replacement surgery coming up on the 25th of the month.  My love and I have hit the first major brick wall in our relationship.  Yes, it's all piling up.  And then there's politics and this damned election season.  And an often intolerable home situation with my dad, which has been exacerbated by the political season.  Too, too much.  My ability to carry the load with grace is not currently available to me.  Sigh.

"Heavy," by Mary Oliver

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 my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
"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, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?