When Death Comes

I feel like the clouds parted and let the light shine brightly into my life today. I had been feeling untethered, but today I am full of newfound purpose. Thinking about the Anais Nin quote, "And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom," I felt drawn to my lovely book, Risking Everything. The first poem speaks to today's enthusiasm for living life to its fullest. Namaste.

When Death Comes
by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Photo: "Daisy Refraction," originally uploaded by Audrey