Her work has such an appreciation of beauty and I am drawn towards it...a bee to a honey pot...I find such consolation and soothing in beautiful things...words, objects, sights and sounds.
In the light of all of the loveliness of yesterday, I was deeply saddened to discover that Sara Teasdale completed suicide on the 29th January 1933.
I mean no judgement about the manner of her death. I am filled with sadness that the beauty she saw and felt and...sang...was not enough to reach through her sense of desolation and her reaching out for oblivion.
I've wondered all day what would have been enough. To find meaning but see no purpose...To see the loveliness and not be consoled...
This is not unfamiliar territory to me...and questions of meaning and purpose are never too far from my thoughts...
And so my mind and my heart have been very much with those people who struggle to find a sense of meaning and purpose in their life...
With those whose pain runs so deep that nothing seems able to touch it...no drug or drink...no words or works...no love...
With those people for whom it is increasingly difficult to keep putting one foot in front of the other...for whatever reason...
For the families who wait anxiously for a telephone call or hold their breath before turning the handle of the bedroom door each morning, for fear of what they might find...
For those already touched by desolation and loss...
From Michael Leunig, who knows a thing or two about this himself...
We pray for the fragile ecology of the
heart and the mind.
The sense of meaning.
So finely assembled and balanced and so
easily overturned.
The careful, ongoing
construction of LOVE.
As painful and exhausting as the struggle for truth
and as easily abandoned.
Hard fought and won
are the shifting sands of this sacred ground, this ecology.
Easy to desecrate and difficult to defend,
this vulnerable joy, this exposed faith,
this precious order. This sanity.
We shall be careful. With others and
with ourselves.
Amen
