🌳 the genius of mary oliver

Mary Oliver's words strike me so deep. I feel my angst in hers. This desire to be of the natural world, but constantly quarrelling with this billowing ambition trying to claw its way out of me.

More than anything I admire her ability to not only put these ideas into prose, but into poetry. Do you know how hard that is? To have an idea so piercing that it could stand as a sentence, but then to go on to weave it into the lines of a poem - lilting and rhythmic and singing.

Maybe that's why her words hit me in a way that others don't. I find peace where she does - amidst the simplicity of the fields and under the bright blue sky. But I am also only human with selfish wants and a short attention span and a heart that can't be at rest or still. That wants and wants and wants no matter how many mediations I utter.

I feel the truth of her words resonating deep within me, like ripples violently marking the surface of an otherwise still pond.

And yet. Each morning isn't the same. Sometimes I read the words and they just bounce off of me - I'm not in a place to hear them or feel them. But on the special days... on these mornings the beast of my mind has curled up in a comma by the fire and is content. It allows the lilt of the words to wash over it. To be ingested, to be felt, to be warmed up in, to be wrapped in. On those mornings, the words fly straight as an arrow to my heart, finding a home in its piercing truths.

I feel the impact as if they have been physically laid upon my chest. And I sit back - the weight of the words a living breathing thing.

And then I think - if only I could carry this poem as a shield around me all day. A forcefield of intentions - strong and noble and good.

But instead, I invariably reach for my phone and any forcefield is instantly pierced by millions of lethal little arrows with names like Email and Slack and Instagram.

Each one not so deadly on its own, but together dismantle the quiet knowledge of the morning.

I want to be stronger and noble. But I guess that the point of Mary Oliver's words. She understands that struggle in each of us. Understands that every morning we wake up mortal and we walk though the world mortal and the only thing we can hope to do is to try.

To live with wonder and amazement and astonishment and to try to spread our work from that place of joy and goodness and hope.

That is my intention for this year, in the end. To sink my toes into the sand -squish them in deep, so that even as the waves of distraction and disillusionment lap over my feet, I am rooted and strong .

Poetry has many jobs - some frivolous and wonderfully so. And others deeply essential - to share the truths of our existence in a way that leaves nowhere to hide. If you've ever heard a piece of music that moves you to tears or seen a painting that stops you in your tracks, you know what I'm talking about.

In this way, poetry is as vital as physics in understanding this world. And I'm not proud to say that my education in the former is woefully lagging that of the latter. But it's also so much more forgiving. I can pick up a poetry book and meditate on the words of just one poem and the truth held within it and that can be enough.

So my work is laid out simply before me.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

—Mary Oliver (When Death Comes)