Home // Rita's Ramblings

Sometimes there’s just too much information and emotion coming in, and my head literally feels like it’s spinning and going to careen off my neck and into a wall.

Over-stimulated.

It must be what a person with ADD or ADHD (what’s the difference between the two? I’ve never understood that) feels like all the time, and it’s not pleasant.  Too much TV, too many thoughts going round in my head, studying to teach on Thursday morning, which means the book of Ephesians is percolating constantly (pretty heady stuff in itself), the news and the fires and the winds and is the world coming to an end?

And then I read a poem by Mary Oliver, one of my favorites, and I’ll share it with you because it settled my spirits and my spinning head faster than anything.  It’s called “I Worried,” and it goes like this:

 

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

Flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not, how shall

I correct it?

 

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

 

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

 

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

 

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

 

Poetry is God’s gift to us to make our head stop spinning.

Try it some time.