News stories are not the conversation starters they used to be. In the day, I could fill an awkward gap by saying “Guess what I heard on NPR this morning?”
I don’t use that line anymore.
These are intense times. Sometimes I wonder if we are living in an information age that may be getting the best of us.
Sometimes, though, a poem jumps off the page and invites you to see the world with new eyes, if only for a moment.
a poem can change everything in a moment
I was looking at the world through those Anxiety Eyes before I read this poem by the late Irish poet Derek Mahon.
I won’t go through the litany of everything that is wrong with the world. You already know it.
Then I read his poem, Everything Is Going to Be All Right
How should I not be glad to contemplate
Everything is Going to be All Right, Derek Mahon
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
“There will be dying,” he acknowledges, “but there is no need to go into that.”
That line averted my Anxiety Eyes. It reminded me that I can contemplate impermanence without holding on to it. I can see what is difficult, and then let it go.
I feel Derek letting me inside his heart as it relaxes, taking a little sip of joy as the lines flow from his pen, from his “watchful heart.”
And in spite of everything—the injustices we keep failing to fix, the pillaging of the earth—the sun rises, and the beauty of the “far cities” is still there, waiting to be seen.
Delight is all around. Help yourself.
Yes, this can sound trite, but it doesn’t to me.
For me, it means that despite all that is wrong, I can still take delight in a moment of well-being.
These moments are so sweet they stop the mind from whining. And they are everywhere, if we just relax those Anxiety Eyes, as Derek shows us, letting us into a most intimate moment of the morning:
in a riot of sunlight
…watching the day break and the clouds flying.
How sweet those moments of well-being!