"I love the rich running day [and]…The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)…This poem drooping shy that I always carry and that all men carry." – Walt Whitman 

     So many of us shy away from poems. I like to carry them around in a pocket of memory so that in any given "now" I can take them out as pictures that revive the soul.

   What poems do you carry with you – not printed on paper but written on your heart?

   There are poems "drooping shy" that live hidden in all of us. We may try to speak the but we can't. For our deepest poem is always beyond the linear world of pictures or music.

   What is the poem that recites itself during your long hours of caregiving? Is it a poem of grieving? A sonnet of celebration? An image of a healing moment?

   Just knowing that my life carries a poem or picture or song is itself healing for me. 

   The poem of our smiles is not limited to our mouth or eyes. When we smile, our whole body smiles. When we cry, our whole body grieves.

   It's not only the faces of the saddened in Newtown, Connecticut that cry. Their entire bodies bend in grief.

   This day, as well, children will die amid bombs in Syria and starvation in the Congo and disease in Bangladesh.

   After we, as caregivers, give thanks that it is not our children that are among the dead can we hold enough Love for the suffering who are not our children? Can we love them as if they were "ours?" 

    The weight of the world's suffering is too much for any of us to hold. The lilt of the world's highest joy may feel beyond our reach.

   What can we do?

   Every moment that we embrace "the rich running day" we are healed.

-Erie Chapman   

Photograph: "Paddling the Harpeth" copyright erie chapman 2011