Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

~ Mary Oliver ~

I love these lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, Sometimes. I love them for their poetic simplicity and for the extraordinary spaciousness that they suggest.

Within these letters and syllables walks Moses who stood there long enough to realize that even though the bush was on fire, it was not being consumed. I can see the Pieta in there too and the textures of Matisse. I hear YoYo-Ma’s cello and the drums from the subway station at Union Square and children singing their hearts’ delight at first communion. I can see the face of the child who imagined a person into flight and the ones who could explain how a prism works.

The diversity of how we tell about our astonishment…AUGH…it makes my heart ache with the fullness of a graceful sigh. Whether we sing it, sculpt it, dance it…speak it, write it, play it…plant it, build it, bake it…whisper it, fly it, or float it to sea in a blue green bottle…

We are called to tell the story…in our own voice and time and way… It is not our story to keep, not entirely…and really, I don’t think I could. There is not room enough inside me for that much wonder and glory and grace and challenge, that many tears and that much laughter, that much love that calls me forth and calls me home.