Missing, Lost, Never Found

From whiskey river:

The Talmud asks the question, “Who is wise?” and gives the surprise answer, “Someone who learns from everyone.” We recognize humility in others by finding something that we can learn from them. Do you hear them? Are you paying attention? There’s something you can learn from everyone, something that only he or she knows, that only he or she can teach you.

It’s like each person’s life has the pieces of a 1,000 piece interlocking jigsaw puzzle. In my experience, no one seems to get issued a complete puzzle. Everyone’s puzzle is missing, on average, seven pieces, and these puzzle pieces are distributed randomly into other people’s puzzles. We spend our lives walking around saying, “Do you need a puzzle piece with a little yellow in the corner and a red line running through it?” Then we meet someone, and he or she says, “Oh, my God, I’ve been looking for it all my life.” We say, “I don’t know what to do with it, I wound up with it, take it, it’s yours.” It’s rarely the author or featured speaker who has your puzzle pieces; it’s usually someone who has a bit part in your life whose name is not recorded in the program.

(Rabbi Lawrence Kushner [unconfirmed source for this version, but see, e.g., this])

…and (italicized lines):

Moonlight

Now comes the white-striped, sharp-nosed digger of dampness
in her black and oily coat.
All night in the moonlight she has been wandering
the stony beach; now she steps
into the gardens and under the street light
like a flat cat.

Her eyes gleaming and her tail aloft, she is afraid
of nothing — not dogs, not policemen who see her
and do not remove themselves from their cruisers, but sail on
down the dark roads.

Everything is famous for something: the eagle for power,
the fox for cunning.
This one we know for her temper and also her smell,
which comes from the wicks of fire.
Yet once I watched and heard her, deep in the woods,
humming to herself as she carried
leaves into her humble house, that was nothing
but a scratched-out hole.

Take care you don’t know everything in this world
too quickly or easily. Everything
is also a mystery, and has its own secret aura in the moonlight,
its private song.

If you meet her
don’t be afraid, just stand still.
And, while you let her stare you down,

notice how she stamps her pretty, little feet.
Notice how she shines.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Not from whiskey river:

52 Hertz
— a letter to Shea in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina

No rebellions from the sea of late, you write. You must be pleased to see it calm, the gray Atlantic, which yearly moves the slender strip of your island a little east, a little west. Across the continent the whale known as the loneliest leviathan on earth roams northward to Kodiak and the Aleutians, singing as much to the silver-furred grizzly kings and to the blue spruce as to its own kind. I can hardly stand to think of it – that solitary keen in the ocean’s dusk. Too high for anyone to hear but a headphone-clad oceanographer in NOAA’s quiet, coastal observatory. (That is, you must know, my favorite of all acronyms.) There are those who suggest the 52 Hertz whale is deaf. Mostly deaf people have suggested this. (Dear Cetologists: have you considered the possibility the whale is singing into silence, into a trembling in his own bones?) Your letter describes a little paper bag full of last year’s white poplar leaves, like plaster chiselings. Pelicans ruling thrones of old pilings. A sable horse by the frosted pond. Your cats inspecting the valleys between one another’s claws. I’d gather them, if I could, sing in their language. I’ll pen this letter on a single olive leaf. I’ll tell you what I saw today: flecked sparrows in the winter brush, cobble-eyed, close enough to touch.

(Corrie Williamson [source])

…and:

Black Oaks

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,
or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I’m pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage
of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,
I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

(Mary Oliver [source])