I commented several months ago to a friend that I was having trouble reaching a place of acceptance with what was occurring in my life. At the time, I didn’t have good words to explain what I meant, or why it was so distressing.

For this reason, I am grateful to come across others who are able to articulate the importance of acceptance, and are able to describe how it does not mean compliance, or submission. It is not giving in, or giving up. It is an opening to the Now moment… it means letting things go, and letting go of the need to want to help, control, and fix everyone and everything around oneself. It means accepting that things are already OK just as they are.

It also brings with it a great healing power, because we tend to invest so much energy in projecting what we want to see onto the world around us. As we also put a lot of energy into running away or hiding from things that hurt us.

Today, I listened to one of the many Dharma talks available at DharmaStream.org… and this one was a teaching on “Acceptance, Letting Go, Being Enough”. It is over an hour long, but luckily for me, that is about the time of my commute on the train - so I am very grateful I took the time to listen to the whole teaching…

And I am especially grateful because at the end, Adrianne recited a poem by Mary Oliver, entitled “In Blackwater Woods”:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
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.