Hear Blessings Drop their Blossoms

Gold soldered cup Dicklehman

The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote,  “Hear blessings drop their blossoms around you.”  In the past few days I’ve been hearing blossoms all around.  Ironically, it’s happening as I am trying to de-clutter my home office.  Never easy, because I’m finding treasured letters, notes, emails…often kept for years. Such kindness comes from friends, family, even strangers I’ve met on book tours…clearly soul gifts.  So, I stop and reread these blossoms.

One that stunned me again with its beauty came from Lynn Liebert Caruso, a marvelous poet and published author, who wrote “From Pieces.” The daughter of a close family friend, she grew up with Krista, and saw our hearts shattered at Krista’s death while volunteering in Bolivia.  She knew of our trip to Bolivia with Aaron (Krista’s husband) to help him close their one room adobe home in a remote village, and the healing we have found in creating gardens and the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship.

She drew on the image of the ceramic cups that ancient Japanese monks kept as one of their few possessions.  It has been told that, centuries later when one of these cups was dropped-shattering to the floor, it was not discarded.  Instead, it was repaired with gold solder.  The repair made the break more prominent, but also gave the cup a new beauty.   Her sensitive gifts with language offer blessings to many.

From Pieces

When the call came that your daughter had died.

That the bus left the road and fell to the valley floor

below.  That her husband searched the Bolivian hillside

to find her in the black night.  Then walked on alone.

Your cup slipped.  Shattered.

When you buried her beside a statue of St. Francis,

beneath stories of love and life lived richly.

When you mourned the daughter you had known

in your womb and feel, again, those first kicks.

When the dogwood bloomed that spring

and you realized great loss lives in the same

house as great love.

You knelt to gather the pieces.

When you traveled to her home in that mountain village,

and hiked to the ravine where she died.  When you set

flowers on the scar–carved deep into the earth

by the falling bus and knew this would be a wound

that would always show.

When you knelt where her body

might have lain and wondered what she last saw–

the sky of stars, her husband’s wild eyes, black night?

You worked to match the shards.

When you met the old woman who took your place

to dress your daughter’s broken body.

When you sprayed her mud home for scorpions

and the villagers came weaving their stories of your

daughter’s love for the cooperative,

for the children, for the God of tarantulas.

When you knew that she would choose to live on.

You warmed the gold solder and poured it in the open places.

When you returned home to find the grief was so

deep it held you to your bed and your keen rang on.

When you finally stood and said,

Weeping Cherry, a gift

then filled the hillside behind your house with peonies

and cherry trees and found that with your hands

you could make things live.

You held the pieces till the solder cooled.

When you started a library, and a foundation that

sent out others in her name.  When you learned that burrowing

into the grief that buried you, there was a spring called love.

And it was deep.  And it would never dry up.

And drinking of it gave you life.

You rose and passed the cup.

Poet, Lynn Liebert Caruso

Lynn so beautifully captures the essence of the deep spring of love that lives forever in a parent’s heart.

Thinking of you and hope that Rumi’s image will give you pause to hear all of the blessings given each day whenever you see blossoms fall.