This morning, before any slippery bits could fall through the rusty sieve between my temples, I decided to jot down notes about what had happened over the last few days since writing about “talking” bunnies, dolphins, deer—and music—but then I became distracted by the Mary Oliver tome I keep on my nightstand. I turned the page from the bookmark, and the following poem was “Whistling Swans.”
Do you bow your head when you pray, or do you look
up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions.
And don’t worry about what language you use,
God no doubt understands them all.
Even when the swans are flying north and making
such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening
and understanding.
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul.
But isn’t the return of spring and how it
springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is
that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all.
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do about
the whole business?
So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can.
Back to my notes:
The morning (a few days ago) after writing “They Would Talk Too,” I pulled up a song from my iTunes I hadn’t listened to for a long time, “Calling All Angels,” a 2003 song by Train that I did not doubt God had auto-delivered to me in 2017 after Joey had been kidnapped, a trauma none of us had ever fathomed. The song was healing for me then, and now I needed a refresher on the words beginning with “I need a sign to let me know you’re here.”
Later that afternoon, I got into my car, heading to therapy, and the identical-same song by the identical-same group, Train, began playing on my Sirus XM station. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard it in real time on the radio.
You can call everything a coincidence if you want. A smartie like Einstein had something to say about that:
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
The following day began after “a ruckus of noise”—a dark night of the soul, which blurred into a dark day of the soul. I remained in bed all day, something I loathe to admit and have only done a handful of times since my sky began falling a few years ago. I alternated between sleep and bawling and full bore, audibly pleading to God for rescue, for a sign—okay, another sign, a clear sign, a better sign. I needed to know He was with me. Right with me. In it with me. I begged for COMFORT.
That very night, I had two dreams. The first:
It was from my vantage point, looking down at my nursing baby, perhaps the sweetest human intimacy I have ever known, one I have previously described—
“There is an image emblazoned in my mind of my baby daughter’s wide blue eyes looking up at mine as I cradled and nursed her. These were the eyes of love. Incomparable, unadulterated love. Sometimes, she paused and smiled, and milk leaked out the corner of her full mouth and dripped down the side of her little face. With her tiny hand wrapped around my finger, I was her world.”
My breastfeeding experiences have been some of my most tender expressions of love, connection, and comfort.
The second dream:
Now, my son, Joey, appeared as a little boy.
I asked, “Joey, where are you?”
He smiled.
“I’m in Heaven.”
Ineffably, my comforter, The Comforter, showed up.
Still, hard head up in here. The skull that’s wrapped around that rusty sieve between my temples, the one near the big, “sticky” ears that sometimes hear and collect sneaky, horrible whispers from a liar about my value—that I have done something terribly wrong, that I’m being punished—maybe even that I am cursed. The ultimate gas-lighter whispers that my Creator has betrayed and abandoned me: that I have been ghosted.
In her poem, “Whistling Swans,” Oliver says, “Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks. Is that really a problem?” Well, duh. His silence, to me, can be cruelly deafening—and I struggle to understand why He goes mute. I know as much as the swans do about this whole business. Or maybe they know more.
The words “Dark night of the soul” come to mind again, and so now–in real time–I look to see what Google AI has to say about them:
A “dark night of the soul” in a spiritual context refers to a profound period of intense emotional and spiritual distress, often characterized by feelings of emptiness, doubt, and a sense of disconnection from God or a higher power, considered a necessary stage of transformation and purification on the path to deeper spiritual growth; the term is most commonly associated with the writings of the mystic Saint John of the Cross.
I make the mistake of assuming these dark days and nights mean I’ve been flat-out ditched.
Ghosted.
But St. John’s notes say something altogether different.
Good enough for St. John and swans; dear God, let it be good enough for me.
And you. (I just suggest it.)
