A Blessing by Mary Oliver

Photo by Theresa Barney

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

 

          

                   Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
                   Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
                   is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

                   ............ Mary Oliver

The Summer Solstice

 

 Brushwood, Solstice 2008

The Summer Day

 Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver. 

 

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

Pay attention to everything in the world,  as if it's alive. 

David Whyte

 

Persephone (2016)

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence

as innocuous as breath

a slight relaxation

at the corners of the mouth.

Just when winter

has become a habit.

An old coat the sun peels off 

with just  a touch,

your foot

leaves a signature

in new mud

shiny as  new skin

or fresh, primed canvas

You notice a blade of grass

green, defiantly green.

Inhale,

you take your coat off

a crocus opens

in the blue iris

of some one's glance.

Lauren Raine

Vermont, 1982

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

From: 

 New and Selected Poems

Copyright ©: 

 Mary Oliver

GRATITUDE by Mary Oliver

What did you notice?

The dew-snail;

the low-flying sparrow;

the bat, on the wind, in the dark;

big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;

the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;

the sweet-hungry ants;

the uproar of mice in the empty house;

the tin music of the cricket’s body;

the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning;

the little bluebirds in their hot box;

the salty talk of the wren,

then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

When did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;

the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;

the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the pale green wand;

at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid beauty of the flowers;

then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows

 making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,

her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue,

her recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness,

her strong legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;

the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;

the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;

the tall, blank banks of sand;

the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders;

the sea and its triangles;

the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green beast of the hummingbird;

the eye of the pond;

the wet face of the lily;

the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;

the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;

the up-swing, the down-pour, 

the frayed sleeve of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

Blossums Along The Way: Mary Oliver

 

BY MARY OLIVER

If you're John Muir you want trees to live among. 

If you're Emily, a garden will do. 
Try to find the right place for yourself. 
If you can't find it, at least dream of it. 
                                             •

When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, 
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow. 
Anything that touches. 
                                             •

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible, 
entirely. 
                                             •

Some words will never leave God's mouth, 
no matter how hard you listen.  
                                             •

In all the works of Beethoven, you will 
not find a single lie.
                                             •

All important ideas must include the trees,
the mountains, and the rivers. 
                                             •

To understand many things you must reach out 
of your own condition. 
                                             •

For how many years did I wander slowly 
through the forest. What wonder and 
glory I would have missed had I ever been
in a hurry!
                                             •

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still
it explains nothing. 
                                             •

The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps.

---

Excerpted from Mary Oliver's collection of poetry, Felicity, published by Penguin Press in October, 2015.

Summer Solstice

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

 

“Make of yourself a light,” 

said the Buddha,
before he died.

I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves. 
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something  of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~ Mary Oliver ~

I woke early, on this longest day:

the light rose among
 the green conversation 
of  trees, a fading star, exultant starlings,
  two grey squirrels 
performing their morning ritual

greeting the only God 
they know,

the Sun

6/2013 

The Coming of the Summer................

"SO SOME OF us are now learning to listen in to and maybe even converse with the elemental utterances of things that don’t speak in words, tuning our ears and our skin to the discourse of multiple other-than-human beings: each redwing blackbird or storm cloud or naked chunk of sandstone jostling with the rest of existence." ......David Abram

The long, hot, introverted summers of Tucson are, like the long winters of the North lands, a time to go inside (quite literally), to  retreat.  With the Pause and strange Silence of the Covid19 Crisis, this seems particularly apt.

It is true, the advent of Summer can sometimes be rigorous, but life here has its own rythems, and just like living in a very cold climate, you adapt.  Then, and provided you have a good cooling system, you can quite learn to enjoy this time.  There are so many plants, flowers, and animals that come forth in the summer - they are citizens of the desert, and it is their time.  Yesterday, for example, I saw a tortoise on my walkway!  Everybody is up by 5:00 when it's cool, and by noon you're inside.  After the sun goes down people emerge again.   The hot desert moon hangs, intense in the heat, over all, and walks in the desert can be very magical indeed.  Just bring water, water, water, because one quickly learns here that without water, there is no life.

A truly Ambitious Agave getting ready to Bloom

Hot or not, it is still almost summer, and the adapted life of the desert is responding.  May is hot and yet, it is still Spring.  

The giant saguaros produce a  crown of beautiful white flowers which quickly become sweet purple fruits (native people make wine and preserves from them) and you see la Paloma, the desert doves, feasting on them. The doves make their mournful call, but actually it's a mating call. 

Agaves shoot up enormous once in a lifetime blooms, a pole of flowers that, when finished and gone to seed, marks the end of their lifetime, their one and only Masterpiece. 

Suddenly I find my garden and feeders full of baby birds as well, and busy finches.  The males sit on the fence glaring (if that is possible) at my cats, chirping over and over:  

"CAT!  It's a CAT!  CAT!  Watch out!"

My cats ignore them, although the Kamicaze swoops of the bigger and more aggressive Mockingbirds they find hard to ignore, and often hide under a chair or two to escape his vigilance.

 As May advances into June, the veneer of greenery in the desert dies back, waiting for the monsoons to come in July, when suddenly,  the vast storms roll in every afternoon, thunder and lightning, pour down floods that disappear within an hour or two...............and almost overnight the desert greens with seeds that have been dormant all year, waiting for this time.
  

It's easy to live inside of apartments, cars,  cyberspace and televisions today, immune to the subtle voices of nature, the "great conversation".  Because I'm a gardener, I seem to always have an ongoing wonder at my rooted "friends".   I remember when I was living in upstate New York, and suffered from asthma.  Every morning I would walk out into my garden and there would be mullein plants, springing up in very odd places I had certainly not planted them.  A herbalist friend remarked, seeing this phenomenon, that the spirit of the plant was trying to help me out.  Mullein is specifically useful to people with lung problems, both as a tonic and as an herb to smoke that clears the lungs.  A true Medicine Plant, a generous plant, responding to my need.   How often do we take the time to thank them?  We don't even notice............but our ancestors did.  

mullein

I had that same experience with "fairy circles", also in New York.  We lived on 40 acres, and I remember, being very involved in Pagan spirituality, I was eager for "signs" in the fields of Devas.    I left offerings, I talked to the trees.  And sure enough, there were a number of times when I would take a walk and see grasses grow up in pretty clear circles.   Fantasy on my part?  Maybe, but other people saw the  "circles".  I like to think the fey folk were saying hello.

Mushroom Fairy Circle (not my picture)

The Desert too has its spirits, its Numina, and if you listen, you can converse with them.  Friendliness has much to do with opening the conversation.  Every season I am honored when my  my Night Blooming Cereus cactus put on such a spectacular show.  I pat the cactus in the morning, thanking it for giving me such beauty.  I am often astounded to see buds, even a rare fruit, in what seems to be out of season on it.   Coincidence?  Maybe the cactus just likes me, and is responding to my great appreciation for its artistry.  Why not?  As an artist myself, I know I respond to appreciation.  What is a flower, but the Masterpiece of a plant, a great big shout of Joi de Vie?

Night Blooming Cereus

The Chance To Love Everything
by Mary Oliver

All summer I made friends
With the creatures nearby –
They flowed through the fields
And under the tent walls,
Or padded through the door,
Grinning through their many teeth,
Looking for seeds,
Suet, sugar; muttering and humming,
Opening the breadbox, happiest when
There was milk and music. But once
In the night I heard a sound
Outside the door, the canvas
Bulged slightly – something
Was pressing inward at eye level.

I watched, trembling, sure I had heard
The click of claws, the smack of lips
Outside my gauzy house –
I imagined the red eyes,
The broad tongue, the enormous lap.
Would it be friendly too?
Fear defeated me. And yet,
Not in faith and not in madness
But with the courage I thought
My dream deserved,
I stepped outside. It was gone.
Then I whirled at the sound of some
Shambling tonnage.
Did I see a black haunch slipping
Back through the trees? Did I see
The moonlight shining on it?

Did I actually reach out my arms
Toward it, toward paradise falling, like
The fading of the dearest, wildest hope –
The dark heart of the story that is all
The reason for its telling?

by Mary Oliver

Found Poetry:"The Barbed Heart Finds Refuge Among the Palos Verde Forest"

Conversations Our Feet Don't Hear

I talked about summer, and about time. 
The  pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night.  About this cup
we call a life.  About happiness.  And how good it feels, the
heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.

He looked neither up nor down 
which didn't necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep.
I felt his energy, stored
under his tongue perhaps,
and behind his bulging eyes.

I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the
blue sky all around my head. 
I said, I wondered how it seemed
to him, down there, intimate with the dust.

He might have been Buddha - did not move, blink, or frown,
not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes 
as the refined anguish of language
passed over him.

Mary Oliver (from "The Truro Bear")

Old pond,
frog jumps in -

splash.

Basho

We have been underground too long

we have done our work,
we are many and one,
we remember when we were human.

We have lived among roots and stones,
we have sung but no one has listened,
we come into the open air
at night only to love
which disgusts the soles of boots,
their leather strict religion.

We know what a boot looks like
when seen from underneath,
we know the philosophy of boots,
their metaphysic of kicks and ladders.
We are afraid of boots
but contemptuous of the foot that needs them.

Soon we will invade like weeds,
everywhere but slowly:

the captive plants will rebel
with us, fences will topple,
brick walls ripple and fall,
there will be no more boots.
Meanwhile we eat dirt
and sleep; we are waiting
under your feet.

When we say Attack
you will hear nothing
at first.

Margaret Atwood, from "You Are Happy"

Summer Solstice 2019

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

 

“Make of yourself a light,” 

said the Buddha,
before he died.

I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves. 
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something  of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~ Mary Oliver ~

I woke early, on this longest day:

the light rose among
 the green conversation 
of  trees, a fading star, exultant starlings,
  two grey squirrels 
performing their morning ritual

greeting the only God 
they know,

the Sun


Lauren Raine
6/2013 

Remembering Mary Oliver

I was so saddened to learn of the death of poet Mary Oliver, who, like Ursula Leguin, has been a lifelong mentor and inspiration.  I felt like sharing again this poem of hers, which says something about her to me.  Because she was, indeed, a Light to the world.

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,” 

said the Buddha,
before he died.

I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.

No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something
of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way: A Poem

BY MARY OLIVER

If you're John Muir you want trees to 
live among. If you're Emily, a garden
will do. 
Try to find the right place for yourself. 
If you can't find it, at least dream of it. 

                                             •

When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, 
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow. 

Anything that touches. 

                                             •

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible, 
entirely. 

                                             •

Some words will never leave God's mouth, 
no matter how hard you listen.  

                                             •

In all the works of Beethoven, you will 
not find a single lie.

                                             •

All important ideas must include the trees,
the mountains, and the rivers. 

                                             •

To understand many things you must reach out 
of your own condition. 

                                             •

For how many years did I wander slowly 
through the forest. What wonder and 
glory I would have missed had I ever been
in a hurry!

                                             •

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still
it explains nothing. 

                                             •

The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps.

---

This poem is excerpted from Mary Oliver's latest collection of poetry, Felicity, published by Penguin Press in October, 2015.