We Shake with Joy
by: Mary Oliver
We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.
This little, three-line poem is Mary Oliver at her most concentrated. It shakes with joy and shakes with grief. The mystery for me is how Oliver manages to capture so much in 23 words/24 syllables. (Yes, I did the math.) There's something so simple and profound in this spare tercet. (You are going to learn some poetic terms today. A "tercet" is a three-line stanza. You can impress your friends and family now at your next gettogether.)
Joy cannot exist without grief. To experience deep happiness, you must also open yourself up to deep sadness. There's no way around this equivalency.
The most joyous times in my life are connected with people I love. On the October day I got married, I had no idea what difficulties and struggles I would face. The Ghost of Mental Illness Yet to Come had not come knocking on my door. On the December morning my daughter was born, I didn't know I would be a single parent during her kindergarten year, volunteering and baking cookies for special events. When I first held my infant son, counted his tiny fingers and toes, I didn't have a clue about school bullying and suicide attempts.
These happiest times of my life contained the seeds of some of my saddest times. Joy and grief in the same shaking body. As I said, you can't avoid this. If living a happy life is one of your goals, then you will experience despair. You can't have one without the other. Period.
That doesn't mean that I go through every day waiting for tragedy to strike. I'm not a bellybutton-gazing Hamlet. I accept joy when it happens, and I also accept sorrow, as well. To go through every day trying to avoid calamity and misfortune is stupid. That's avoiding life, not living it.
If you want to laugh, you must be willing to cry. Accept it. Embrace it. Let your body shake with it. That is my advice for today.
Get yourself a a bracelet: WWSMD.
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