The Sea by Pablo Neruda

I don't usually read a lot of poetry, but lately some lovely poems have crossed my path. "The Sea" was quoted at the Surfrider conference a couple months ago and I don't want to forget it:

I need the sea because it teaches me,
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.
It’s not simply the shells crunched
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from a sliver of salt,
and the great god out of a spoonful.
What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air
ceaseless wind, water and sand.
It seems a small thing for a young man,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the cracking of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

Oh how we have been needing rain in California! Although I have a hard time with the early darkness and the cold, I am grateful for the rain. At work, I've led some drizzly field trips with 5th graders recently. Exploring the redwood groves during rain has its own magic.

Pre-drizzle: a cloudy day at the Russian River

Mary Oliver's poetry is beautiful, meditative, and really helps to calm my sometimes stressed mind. In honor of the rain we have been receiving, here's a lovely poem by Mary Oliver:

Last night
 the rain
 spoke to me
 slowly, saying,
 what joy
 to come falling
 out of the brisk cloud,
 to be happy again
 in a new way
 on the Earth!

That’s what it said
as it dropped,
smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches
and the grass below.

Then it was over.
The sky cleared.

I was standing
under a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,
and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars
and the soft rain–
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.