This is the season for weddings. I have been to one this year and will, gods also willing, be to another a month from now: a fit cap to the month named for Juno Pronuba. I have word of others going on around me, and that is well. I also have word of others of the United States (though not yet mine) being told by judges that states may not grant civil marriage recognition to some couples and not others. That too is well. I stand with you, who uniquely yearn, in Love’s House.

It has, for me, also been a season for funerals. I have been to one this year, a week and a half ago, to honor and bid adieu my mother’s mother’s sister Lillie Alice Wheeler Cooper, Mrs. West. But I have word of others passing around me, particularly a cousin’s grandmother and the grandfather of a dear friend who is a sister to me, and a co-worker’s mother. Gods also willing, no more so close so soon — though I know all of our days are numbered, and every day is someone’s last, and others mourn her. I sit with you, who newly mourn, in Love’s House.

It has not been, for me, a season for births. But I personally know two sets of parents each anxiously waiting, gods also willing, for a birth after a loss. I know others still wandering and wondering. I watch in wonder the thriving little members of the Class of 2013, bodies growing and learning to fit the world to each new person. I know the spirit members of the class play alongside, even as they pursue the duties that called them away. We all hunt hope hungrily, though it can be bitter to those of us who worry that we know better. I walk with all of you, who stepwise hope, through Love’s House: cautious, carefree, clumsy, cool.

I have lived to see everyone with Internet access become her own newspaper announcing, among many other things, deaths of celebrities. Mostly I refrain from that: I don’t feel comfortable with any selection criteria when it comes to something so commonly human. Since I cannot obituate everyone, better I stick to those close to me. But I will mention yesterday’s passing of Doctor Maya Angelou.

She, and al Rumi, and Gautama, and Kroeber le Guin, and many others each in her own way tell about some combination or alternation of contentment and joy that waits on the other side of suffering. I used to tell about it myself, even then knowing that I hadn’t ever suffered much outside my head. But I was so much older then.

These days, I don’t know even the little I thought I knew about purpose and possibility. I don’t trumpet the way I used to, even quietly. For all my recognition that enlightenment is an ordinary day, I think I missed or misunderstood that the suffering that can be what shows it is also something new each day, whether we dance across it or run from it or merely discover ourselves once again on the other side of it. In life there is no permanent enlightenment, just as against time there is no victory but having been worthy to be added to what others carry into their new day.

Since even my thoughts mumble, it’s that much easier to still and listen to those wiser, or who have known suffering such as I, gods also willing, never will know. I listen especially to Doctor Angelou right now, in her honor and in the small satisfaction that I too once wrote a poem about mourning in which mourners huddled in darkness.

The page I cite for her poem adorns it with a photograph of her at the funeral for which she composed it, where she recited it — and that’s just right. I’ve chosen a different picture, because I do know that she is dancing with Amiri Baraka, and Langston Hughes, and countless others. All the old dances, and dances she did not have time to learn or create before, and dances that cannot be done under gravity. And singing too. She has all the body offers and all it bars. So I can be happy for them. I mourn our losses.

“When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
We can be.  Be and be
better.  For they existed.