Not far from where I start to gather the ripened berries, I begin, as usual, to slow down. Then, pretty soon, I am doing nothing. I am just sitting there in the little bundles of leaves.
In the distance a sparrow is singing over and over his serene and very simple song. Oh to hear him within the enclosure of nothing else!
Friend, I am becoming desperate. What shall I do? How quickly, if I only knew by what remedy, I would turn from the commotion of my own life.
While on and on and on, the sparrow sings.
Mary turns to the song of the sparrow to be still with what is and we turn to her poems. In her desperate longing to meld with the beauty around her, she sings on an on in poetry. I wonder if we begin to see her life turn towards the last decades. I imagine myself as her - so wanting to sing, and so wanting to just listen. We are caught in our discord, not hearing the inherent harmony within this tension.
Today I received a personal email from Jane Goodall. Her face blurs with that of Mary in my mind - two women nearly the same age fiercely singing of the beauty they have seen disappeared, doing all they can to produce and give back to an aching world, and yet lured into the serenity of the beauty before them. I too am desperate. The only remedy I know is to add my breath to yours, that our days upon this earth may be long, so that the days of all beings may belong.
What are you desperate to do? To be?
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