Playing Dress Up

Playing dress up wasn't a big part of my childhood. Mom wasn't an evening gown and high heels kind of gal. She lived in a cotton dress world, to borrow a phrase from Nick Lowe, especially during those early years. No, we were just ourselves, little kids running around in the woods and down endless dirt roads.

It came to me very early this morning, while reading a poem by Mary Oliver, that those years not only gave rise to my love of nature, but they also helped to shape my spiritual life. I think a big part of this return to the land of my youth is about remembering that, recalling who I am, with spirit firmly at the center.

Here's Mary, who never fails to help me remember.

"Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)"

The spirit
   likes to dress up like this:
     ten fingers,
       ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
   at night
     in the black branches,
        in the morning

in the blue branches
   of the world.
     It could float, of course,
       but would rather

plumb rough matter.
  Airy and shapeless thing,
     it needs
        the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
   the oceanic fluids;
      it needs the body's world,
        instinct

and imagination
   and the dark hug of time,
     sweetness
        and tangibility,

to be understood,
   to be more than pure light
     that burns
        where no one is --

so it enters us --
   in the morning
     shines from brute comfort
        like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
   lights up the deep and wondrous
     drownings of the body
        like a star.


~ Mary Oliver




Here's Nick Lowe and  "True Love Travels on a Gravel Road."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4I21_vooWI  


Image: "Icarus"  by Henri Matisse