These are sorrowful and bewildering days. It is hard to get our bearing in place and time. Mary Oliver's poem Love Sorrow offers so many beautiful ideas about how we can use our agency and intention to embrace our own pain and sorrow.
Take this time to draw a picture or write your own poem about how you can and will hold and protect the most vulnerable spaces within us so they too can grow up.
Please share your creative expressions on social media (mention us @goodcleanlove) and we will share them with the Good Clean Love audience.
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.
