What is your inner ocean like?

Another Monday after a rainy week end has arrived and with it more gratitude for the fact that we have so much while others have so little. This applies to the rain (the midwest suffers from the lack of it), the comfortable house that shelters us, the fact that we do have all the modern conveniences - I am grateful and then I pray for all those who lack water, have no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and so many things we take for granted in the United States.
Well, this is not getting to the poem I am going to share today; I just received it from a good friend and so I want to share it with you today - it is a haunting poem full of images to reflect on - we do have an inner ocean...

“The Silence Now” by May Sarton

These days the silence is immense.

It is there deep down, not to be escaped.

The twittering flight of goldfinches,

The three crows cawing in the distance

Only brush the surface of this silence

Full of mourning, the long drawn-out

Tug and sigh of waters never still –

The ocean out there, and the inner ocean.

Only animals comfort because they live

In the present and cannot drag us down

Into those caverns of memory full of loss.

They pay no attention to the thunder

Of distant waves. My dog’s eager eyes

Watch me as I sit by the window, thinking.

At the bottom of the silence what lies in wait?

Is it love? Is it death? Too early or too late?

What is it I can have that I still want?

My swift response is to what cannot stay.

The dying daffodils, peonies on the way.

Iris just opening, lilac turning brown

In the immense silence where I live alone.

It is the transient that touches me, old,

Those light-shot clouds as the sky clears,

A passing glory can still move to tears,

Moments of pure joy like some fairy gold

Too evanescent to be kept or told.

And the cat’s soft footfall on the stair

Keeps me alive, makes Nowhere into Here.

At the bottom of the silence it is she

Who speaks of an eternal Now to me.