In the Midst of the Hardest Movement

This one got me through four years of working all day and going to evening law school all night, scared, out on a limb, worried that I had wildly overestimated my own abilities, my finances, my energy. May it provide the same courage to you.

No one ever told us that we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down, in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue
-- And in fact we can't live like that; we take on
everything at once before we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born,
At most we're allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman's voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching apart, that woman's heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that groundnote echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Adrienne Rich from Transcendental Etude in The Dream of a Common Language

I thought of it again this Sunday, holding my grandson and wondering what his eighty or ninety years on Earth will bring, with all the environmental destruction we've wrought, and how helpless I feel to protect him. Perhaps it will be enough, the "few months of simply listening to the simple line of a woman's voice singling a child against her heart." So, for a few hours I hold him against my heart and I sing: "Our hands will work for peace and justice/Our hands will work to heal the land/Gather round the harvest table/Let us feast and bless the land." May it be so for him.