In Mary Oliver’s ‘Alligator Poem’ she writes about almost being killed by an alligator, how, afterward, she “…rose from the ground/and saw the world as if for the second time/the way it really is.”

I thought about her poem after the earthquake here in the DC area (when my house shook and rumbled I thought at first it was a gas explosion) and again at 1am last Saturday night as Hurricane Irene swept through.

That night I sat on the floor wrapped in a blanket, listened to pounding wind and rain, and startled at each dull thunk of another blown transformer. I wondered then how it might be possible to see the world with fresh eyes not only after a possibly dangerous event happens but even while it is happening.

I was afraid during both weather events but I felt exhilarated too, as if some wild, instinctual part of me was woken.  It was almost like being called awake. The call, as best I can translate, is about creating and living from an internal island of safety, a centered refuge, that allows me both to experience my fear as it arises, and at the same time, to be open to the wonder and exhilaration of seeing the world with new eyes.

From this centered island of internal safety, change in the outer world is like a flower in all its stages, the bud swelling and opening its petals to the sun, closing them at night, and eventually losing them all and dying, even as another bud begins to swell.

From the destabilizing charge of external events comes a chance for deeper connection with those around us. After the earthquake had subsided, I heard voices in the street and ran outside to exclaim in relief with other people. After the hurricane I ended up having a drink on their back porch with my neighbors.

In another poem, ‘In Blackwater Woods’, Mary Oliver writes:

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.

Somehow we are all being asked now to practice and learn how to do each of these three actions. Especially we are being taught how to let go, which is of course, the hardest to do, and yet paradoxically, the most rewarding.