I was exchanging emails with an old high school friend last week discussing our 20-year reunion, coming up this summer. One comment in her email struck me, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since – “Could you have ever imagined 20 years ago that you would be where you are in life today?”

I saw the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” not too long ago, and one scene in the movie asked a similar question. Brad Pitt’s character narrates an unfolding of events that culminated in an accident that proves crucial to the plot of the movie – “If only one thing had happened differently: if that shoelace hadn’t broken; or that delivery truck had moved moments earlier; or that package had been wrapped and ready, because the girl hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend; or that man had set his alarm and got up five minutes earlier; or that taxi driver hadn’t stopped for a cup of coffee; or that woman had remembered her coat, and got into an earlier cab…”

I can say that I’ve had moments in my life when I’ve applied the same logic to some tragedy or other painful experience – I’m sure we all have. But I can also say that as I sit here sipping a cup of hot tea, my children sleeping quietly down the hall, my cat Emelye curled up in my lap and purring softly, a wedding a few months away, my friends and family on my mind, and a whirl of moments I have experienced, decisions I have made, and paths I could have traveled down, there is a peaceful feeling that life resolves and places us where we are meant to be when we are meant to be there.

Could I have ever imaged 20 years ago that I would be where I am? No. Can I image where I might be tomorrow, or a month or year or 20 years from this moment? No, but like Mary Oliver in this month’s poem, I am extremely optimistic…

Stewart

Mary Oliver
(1935 -  )

Walking To Oak-Head Pond,
And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit
In The Next Days And Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled–
I’m wading along

in the sunlight–
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead–
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon–
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from–
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind–

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage–
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

Mary Oliver
(1935 – )

Poem Number 135

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and
Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the
Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled-
I’m wading along

in the sunlight-
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

Mary Oliver
(1935 -   )

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her–
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

Peonies

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open —
pools of lace,
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away
to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again —
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?