Tag: Mary Oliver

From the mindfulness bench

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What we need is here
Wendell Berry – from The Wild Geese

A meditation on presence, play, and the scent of red leather


A wonderfully pale blue sky has framed Dumfries and Galloway in the last couple of days. Warm sunshine, together with the provision of a lovely ‘mindfulness bench,’ just big enough for two people, and overlooking the pond and Dalbeattie Burn at Colliston Park, made it an absolute pleasure to spend a couple of happy hours in this 9.5 acre park playing with my younger daughter and grandchildren. Yes, we shared some mindfulness, and – as is quite often the case after a time of stillness – the light scent of my daughter’s red leather jacket lingers with me now. My teenage grandson spoke of being willing enough, but needing practice at writing 1000 word essays, and of enjoyment in working with his hands. His younger sister ‘took us’ all – by way of an imaginary tractor, to Kirkcudbright – 42 miles away, ‘for fish and chips,’ returning just in time for (actual) donuts from Dalbeattie bakery before we went our separate ways. Flowers, sunshine, sky, running burn, meditation, conversation, warm scent, dreamscape and donuts …

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It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world
Mary Oliver – from Invitation

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Warmth in my soul

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… you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine

Mary Oliver
from
When I am among the trees
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I have a deep-seated need for times of stillness and silence – always have – but the need increases amid the cacophony of contemporary life. And death.

A lover of poetry, I nonetheless recognise that there are times when compassionate, listening silence has an equally important role in my own life, and in the life of society, and of nations.

I know of several friends who have distinct and affectionate relationships with particular trees. An Acer in my Lakeland garden has long been one of my friends in Nature, and today I have watched and watched some more, stunned at times by sunlight’s appearing as flames of fire amid her limbs. Soul warming. Peace-filled.

May we, that’s to say ALL humankind, learn to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.

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A cloud of interests

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There wasn’t
time enough for all the wonderful things
I could think of to do

in a single day. Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart

as another good idea.
I say this
as I stand in the woods

and study the patterns
of the moon shadows,
or stroll down into the waters

that now, late summer, have also
caught the fever, and hardly move
from one eternity to another.

Mary Oliver
From ‘Patience’
New and Selected Poems
Volume Two

Happy September! I’m having a quiet evening and feeling peaceful and mellow.

I’ve been thinking, too, about my automatically generated ‘tag cloud’ here, and of how it gives a pretty good account of some of my chief interests … inner life, contemplation, Edinburgh, poetry …

Autumn and winter will be warmed by an array of interests and occupations like these.

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Without love

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Roger Housden once again reaches into the soul of me in a short chapter on Mary Oliver’s West Wind #2

There is life without love.

Mary Oliver is speaking directly to that part of you and me that knows, however faintly, that when we rush into life, when we leap into action without any connection to the deeper currents that move through us always, we are acting without love. Our oars thrash at the water, and we break the gossamer web of life this way.

There is indeed a life without love, she says. It is quite possible to live a life in which your soul plays no part. You can jump up and down with every passing impulse, and never hear the whispering call that is there all along.

Yes: the cantus firmus – the enduring melody. That’s the note and that’s the song that I’m trying daily to listen out for. Of course there’s life without love, but such a life is not what we were made for.

… when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.

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At Waitrose Morningside

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How many cloudscapes have calmed and steadied your life’s racing?

only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in is wider than that.
And anyway, what’s wrong with Maybe?
You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen.
I’ll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

Mary Oliver, The World I Live In. Felicity: Poems | Penguin Publishing Group, 2015

How many poems have given your imagination a much-needed workout? The world of the ‘ordinary’ is actually extraordinary. And life is an invitation to see extraordinary ordinary everywhere. In front of you, around and behind. ‘You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen.’ And in this afternoon alone I’m expecting to see more. Life is an open door …

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How many shopping carts might be needed to transport the groceries of angels-in-ordinary?
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How many life-and-love-stories are playing out behind every window and door, and on every floor of the architecture of existence, all around you now?

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Awakening

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Build it, and it will come
Empty out a drawer for someone
They will fill it
Share your work every day
People will find it
Walk and your legs will strengthen
Open your hours and your days will fill
Speak as though you’ve arrived
And reality will realign

Brianna Wiest
Salt Water

Spring’s awakening in Edinburgh is wonderfully underway and I’ve been out and about early. Delicious coffee and cake @kates_edinburgh preceded one of my favourite sorts of morning: an amble – in no particular rush and in no particular direction. This is a city that ‘offers itself to your imagination’ (as Mary Oliver might have said of it) – no matter where one roams. Birdsong everywhere speaks today of their having ‘arrived’ (again) and of the energetic building of nests in empty spaces. A beautiful new coffee shop shares its work every day and ‘people will find it.’ My legs do grow stronger, and hours are containers for rich colours and conversations. I speak of my thankfulness and – awakening thereby – the realities of a new season do indeed ‘realign.’

Delivered

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Some joys that come to our doorsteps, inevitably, outshine others. Perhaps because some such joys carry a particular measure of comfort. Something along the lines of – no matter how awful things may appear at times, this life is full of so much richness and goodness that we cannot help but tumble into the kind of response that is the very name of this treasury of awe and wonder. Devotions.

Attentiveness

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This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness

Mary Oliver
cited by Parker J Palmer,
Quaker elder and columnist for
On Being – here

What would the world feel like tomorrow morning if broadcast ‘world news’ tonight was comprised of just the one piece of Wisdom Mary Oliver notes here?

No advice, no opinions, no looking to leaders of any kind, nor any seeking to lead or be led. Just every single person in the world watching quietly, without reaction, and with benign interest, the stream of soul-destroying thoughts ticker-taping inside their own head. And letting them go.

What would the world feel like tomorrow morning if there was a complete absence of noise – noise replaced with no thing other than focused attentiveness, however brief?

Could we laugh at ourselves and our shifting certainties? Could we put to one side our politics and religions, our tribes and education, our perceptions of culture and dominions – even for a little space? Would we yearn to return soon to the stillness and silence of such a soul-building place?

In the morning and at afternoon and evening: let it begin, again, with me.

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May I?

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Wild geese over south-west Scotland | Nikon D3300 & 40mm f/2.8 | click x2 to enlarge

May I be forgiven for being a little immodestly proud of this photo? Captured today from the passenger seat of our moving car (70mph), heading north, in south-west Scotland. I think I’ve always loved geese and ‘big sky’ – even before encountering my poet-inspiration Mary Oliver – but undoubtedly more since. Mary’s Wild Geese is perhaps one of her best-known and best-loved poems, and whenever I encounter a flight like this one my heart is warmed. I think of her, and inwardly recite an array of her works. Actually, during the course of the visit, and on the homeward journey, we saw perhaps half a dozen more such flights, several of them much larger than this one. What it must be, to be able to take off like that, honking encouragement to one another en route. Oh, and that sky …

Little bins

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Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly thought

Mary Oliver
Upstream, page 25

Recycling in the UK has had a bad press this month. I read I’m not as good at it as I once was, and need to live in one of four counties to pass muster. Boxes and bags are out. Ubiquitous and ugly wheeled bins host the nation’s best-ordered recycling efforts.

Mary Oliver writes of the social self that might be cycling life through ‘twelve little bins’ – the hours of the clock – more concerned with keeping pace with the ‘regular’ governor of time than with whether or not it gathers ‘some branch of wisdom or delight’ along the way.

Containers play their part, like the hours. But both the regular and the irregular – coupled with an ability to reflect and to ask ‘what am I doing and why am I doing it?’ – are essential elements whatever we’re talking about, wherever we are, and whatever we do.

Sunlit flight

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Photo at 2CRG

The now orange leaves of
the Japanese Acer
in our English cottage
garden skitter – a new
Sunday morning’s quiet
autumn dawn – and a light
turn of an Upstream page
like salmon’s sunlit flight
is early wandering
through riverside landscape
with Mary Oliver
while each alone – and in
their own parts – sings new and
silent sabbath-songs deep
in observing hearts

SRM

(* Upstream, is a new Penguin Press collection of Selected Essays by Mary Oliver)