Love Note:  Bearing Perfect Love

Hello Dear Ones-

On this beautiful spring day my thoughts continually turn toward our upcoming celebration of Earth Day (this Wednesday April 22nd).  One of the things I love about this holiday is that it encompasses so many facets of our Mother Earth.

In the poem below, Mary Oliver embraces one of those facets… the sacred presence of a black bear in springtime.  I am particularly drawn to her identifying the bear’s only question as one that inquires about loving this world.  What a different world we would live in if that was the primary imperative of the human species.  Indeed, is there a more perfect love?

Sending my love to each of you,
Lori

 

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

~ Mary Oliver ~