On this eve of Mother’s Day I am sending you two offerings…one is literary and the other is musical.

The poem by A.R. Ammons speaks initially about the simple act of walking.   Many of us are now experiencing this ordinary activity with more frequency.  Hopefully as we do we are open to the quietly extraordinary slivers of creation that await our walks…slivers that are alive and profound, and even musical (a topic about which we will hear more tomorrow!).

The author then speaks of a mother’s care in tending to us, bearing us tenderly, seeing us through.   If we are 5 or 85, each of us innately longs for such love to ease our pain and quell our cries.

The song that follows builds on this, as women physicians join voices to sing Rise Again.

“We rise again in the faces of our children.
We rise again in the voices of our song.
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean.
And then we rise again.”

Happy Mother’s Day to all who embody what Mother’s Day celebrates…rising again and again.

Love,
Lori

Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation's fringes,
the eddies and curlicues

~ A.R. Ammons 

Voices Rock Medicine – A Toronto-based Choir of Women Physicians sings RISE AGAIN (virtually) by Leon Dubinsky in tribute to the health care community during these challenging times.

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuiqee-AC-o&feature=youtu.be