Eternity is not later

I stumbled last night upon a Mary Oliver poem (in her collection Blue Iris) I didn't recall reading before, or maybe it was just that it is about something my friend Barb and I had been discussing earlier. In the poem, "Count the Roses," Mary Oliver moves from instructions, to questions, to conclusions about the mind and about roses. Then she says:

"Yes, the mind takes a long time, is otherwise occupied
than by happiness, and deep breathing."

And the focus of the poem changes, moves from the mind's words to "now":

"Now, in the distance, some bird is singing.
And now I have gathered....
and now I have put....
and now I am moving....."

With each "now," especially when reading the poem out loud, as I was, the breath drops and the mind stills, moves from past and future to the present moment. Eventually, Oliver concludes, "finally even the mind comes running, like a wild thing, and lies down in the sand."

"Eternity is not later, or in any unfindable place.
Roses, roses, roses, roses."

We had been talking, Barb and I, about our experience of eternity in the moment: Barb in her long-time practice of Tibetan Buddhism, I in the all-knowing silence of a tree, or more recently in my cat's gracious bending to caress my cheek with his when I was feeling sad living in a moment already gone -- recalling me to the present. It had made me wonder about the relationship between such moments and all the pain. Mary Oliver addressed that question, too:

"Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand?"

That question was in the first part of the poem, the mind's part. By the end of the poem, Oliver has moved the reader, through the breath, beyond the question "that can't be answered." I'd had the same experience that night with my cat. There is breathing, in this moment, breathing in roses, or incense, or purring, or the hum of a Tibetan bowl. And there is, just on the other side of some membrane's thickness, all the pain out there that is always changing but equally eternal.

And there is some relationship, but I don't know what it is. It seemed very clear that night, though, that the breathing moment is eternal, and is more real than what eternally moves on the other side of the membrane.