Tag: Mary Oliver

A cloud of interests

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more @gardenstudiogram | click to enlarge

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.’

Self-Portrait

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Among the pleasures I’ve celebrated today – 2-2-22 – has been news from a new friend who wrote of hers in taking delivery of a copy of Devotions, and that … ‘yes, Mary Oliver definitely nailed the important things in Wild Geese.’

Mary Oliver will have known, in her time on earth, of just how widely her body of work was received and welcomed. I wonder, sometimes, if her great soul might in any sense be aware, still, of the huge hunger that exists now for her words – words which are at once balm, compassion, contemplation, counsel, ecology, forgiveness, graciousness, gratitude, generosity, love, mercy, prayer, profundity and innumerable rich seams of simplicity, all vital to thriving vivacity and global, universal wellbeing.

This great, greatly beloved wise poet and teacher laughed and loved and prayed and shed tears and wondered and wondered and wondered in her encounters with life’s every gift, grace and mystery. That my new friend should perhaps have taken this volume to her bedside table tonight pleases me no end …

From the poet’s Self-Portrait: (Devotions, page 117)

I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans …

Upward, old legs! There are roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch

though I’m not twenty
and won’t be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.

Mary Oliver’s lifetime of devotions always involved showing you and me what poetry – and what life – are for. May friends, writers and readers today be … full of beans.

Silence and stillness

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Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed
an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which, 
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing …

Mary Oliver
from Snowy Night

There’s been a hushed stillness here today. My morning walk gave way to a post-thaw amble after dark. I’ve been pondering the ‘power’ of a perfectly symmetrical snowflake * which, in company with millions of others like it, can quieten wide spaces and bring about a stillness that nothing else can. Ordinary human activity is disrupted and it’s not without reason, I think, that we’re sometimes awestruck by the sound of silence (and occasional hooting) that accompanies falling snow. Thoughts give way to quietened wonder … and – as Mary Oliver goes on to ask …

aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? 


* see ‘Symmetry of Snowflakes’ by Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Digital Media Fellow, Faculty of Science in the University of Warwick

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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Ropes

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… I’ll just tell you the unexpected, joyful conclusion. The dog officer resigned! And the next officer was a different sort; he too remembered and missed the old days. So when he found Sammy he would simply call him into his truck and drive him home. In this way, he lived a long and happy life, with many friends.

This is Sammy’s story. But I also think there are one or two poems in it somewhere. Maybe it’s what life was like in this dear town years ago, and how a lot of us miss it.

Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.

Mary Oliver
Upstream

I’ve loved a quiet day today. Perhaps too quick though to speak of its having been a reading day. Truth is that it’s been more of a being read day today – by what often and somewhere and sometime I’ve read before.

Mary Oliver features in my daily meditations like whole pages posted by some unimaginably marvellous means into the space just behind my closed eyes – the page having first risen up from somewhere very close to the heart, and from the gratitude-filled chambers in my soul. Not read today, but being read by.

Mary Oliver! Close friend I’ve never met. Did you ever know that such a reading would become recognised by another as a part of your long-held vocation, in innumerable times and places, all over the world? And deep within me? Whom you help, again and again, to see.

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Monday morning

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Riotous birdsong this morning and – though I’m almost certainly kidding myself – a sense that Spring is not far away. Snow along the Pennine ridge is a feature of Spring up here – and somehow looks lovelier than usual when viewed from a landscape strewn with daffodils. Not many of those around yet, though there are a few hardy yellow souls numbered among our garden snowdrops.

I’ve been wondering today how a heron I’ve been watching for a few days can stand for so long in a freezing cold river. (And rehearsing chunks of Mary Oliver’s Upstream in my head). This most watchful and patient of fishermen must have thermally protected legs and feet. I’m minded to look up how that could be. Plodding along, close to home, I was startled and delighted by a deer just feet away. Or perhaps I ought to say that the unsuspecting deer was startled by me! Too quick for a photo today, I shall keep a closer watch for them in future.

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)