Something I wish I'd written

You get a lot of good stuff off http://thepioneerwoman.com/. For example, there are the photography tips, hints, tricks and free photoshop actions, which have really helped prod my picture taking evolution. There are the fabulous recipes that I will never ever ever attempt, but that still look amazing in pictures that make the food look piping hot and delicious, like you could smell it cooking right through the internet. There's the smartypants quizzes, the homeschooling info (that, I'll be honest, isn't of much use to me) and the harlequin romance novel story of Pioneer Woman's courtship with Marlboro Man (her husband). All of which is extremely valuable and worthwhile information . . . but today, in a post about her mom and grandma, Pioneer Woman published the attached poem which really touched me. It was in there because her mom forwarded the poem, which is just like her mom to do (it was a mother's day post, after all). But I read it and thought, "this is how I feel when I stand out on my back deck alone and stare into the city-fied woods, and remember growing up on the farm near real woods, and real fields and real hog smell. Hog smell aside, a powerful bond exists between me and God's creation, and my small but solid place in it, and frankly, I just liked the poem's words.
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“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
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Yeah, Mary, I'll try. I'll try.