What evidence do you need to know you are loved?
To know you are strong enough?
To know you can handle THIS too?
I think I spend more time than I realize searching for evidence. I look everywhere for proof that everything will be okay.
But maybe I’m looking too hard.
Maybe all the evidence I need is already here. Right in front of me.
Maybe it’s in the soft wind blowing against the Fall leaves sending them sailing towards the ground to land right at my feet.
Maybe it’s in the tap, tap, tap of an excited puppy tail against the floor greeting me as if I were the most important person in his world.
Maybe the evidence is in the simple fact that the world continues on every day without prompting.
And I can too.
And so can you.
The line in this image follows these lines from one of Mary Oliver’s poems in her collection called Evidence:
“There are many ways to perish or to flourish.
How old pain, for example, can stall us at the threshold of function….
Still friends, consider stone, that is without the fret of gravity, and water that is without anxiety.
And the pine trees that never forget their recipe for renewal.
And the female wood duck who is looking this way and that way for her children. And the snapping turtle who is looking this way and that way also. This is the world.”
This is the world, and we are witnesses to it.
Shouldn’t that be all the evidence we need?
