“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ~ Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver was a popular, American poet whose poetry fused her love of nature with her love of the divine. Her poems are deeply spiritual and are a joyful celebration of the natural world. They shed light on the reality that these two concepts are inseparable.
Her poetry is thought by scholars to be simple, and yes, if by simple they mean it’s accessible, it is that. Yet her words paint subtle and loving detail of her subjects that only a divine hand can accomplish.
She wrote mainly about nature and its connection to God, but her abusive childhood is the foundation from which her inspiration rises. Like a seed in the soil of humanity, it taps deeply into the human experience and reaches to connect with more lofty ideals, supporting a balanced relationship with the universe. Without the darkness, you cannot have the light.
Here is one of my favorites:
“I Worried”
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.
Ms. Oliver’s poetry does, indeed, seem to start on the earth as a seed germinating. Then it pokes its head up into the sunlight, reaches for the sky and then blossoms as it touches the divine. Like the cycle of life, when her words reach their pinnacle, she brings us back down to the earth to relish the life we have in the here and now, connecting human to human as souls having a human experience on Mother Earth. Here’s an example:
“The Gardener”
Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any conclusion?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?
I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.
Actually I probably think too much.
Then I step out into the garden,
where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man,
is tending his children, the roses.
In her poem “Sleeping in the Forest,” Ms. Oliver finds a cocoon in nature, a place that nurtures and cradles her like a mother would a child. Mother Nature is there as a foundation for her, and it seems that she does not want to return to the world of humans, or perhaps, to her life as a human on Earth.
“Sleeping in the Forest”
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom.
By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
“Song of the Builders” lets us see the world through a magnifying lens. We begin with a wider view, one of the surrounding environment and its connection to the divine. Then Ms. Oliver brings us into the present moment, which is when life takes place, and gives us the privilege of peering through her lens to understand that each of God’s creatures, large or small, has an equal importance in the universe.
“Song of the Builders”
On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –
a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.
Finally, “Why I Wake Early” brings the universe inside each of us, filling us with divine light, whether we want it or not. None of us can escape the fact that we are part of the universe and are all God’s creations. We are invited to welcome and cherish each day we have the privilege of living on Mother Earth.
“Why I Wake Early”
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day.
Take time every day to be grateful for all that is in your life, in this very moment. Beauty and love are there if you choose to see them.
“Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.” ~ Mary Oliver
###
