Mary Oliver: The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
“The Uses of Sorrow” by Mary Oliver
From the collection Thirst, 2007.
Beacon Press.
What qualities has a box full of darkness
opened up for you?
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Mary Oliver’s “The Uses of Sorrow” is only four lines long, yet it carries the weight of a lifetime. As a former MMA fighter, I understand the physics of impact. As a poet and investigative journalist, I understood the pursuit of hard truths. But neither the cage nor the byline could prepare me for the specific, suffocating weight of a “box full of darkness.”
For me, that box contained the childhood trauma of abuse and the deafening silence of holding a stillborn child. These experiences felt like pure wreckage, nothing else.
In my office at Penn State, a calligraphy painting by the late Thich Nhat Hanh hangs on the wall. It reads: No Mud, No Lotus. We love the lotus for its pristine bloom, but we often forget that its beauty is entirely dependent on the muck from which it rises. The flower needs the mud.
However, there is a nuance here that Oliver captures in the phrase, “It took me years.” We cannot force the bloom. In a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh in Thailand, I learned that we don’t need to dive back into our trauma, our darkness, with “open petals” before we are ready. We need psychological safety to process the mud.
If you are currently holding a box of darkness, do not feel pressured to call it a gift yet. Or ever. It’s okay if it just feels heavy right now. For me, this poem is a reminder that the mud is home to precious nutrients. When the time is right, and the safety is there, the lotus will rise.
Cameron Conaway