Mary Oliver and Paying Attention

 

 

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway that I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

"Attention is the beginning of devotion"

Mary Oliver

The tributes are springing from every source for poet Mary Oliver, who died yesterday at the age of 83. Oliver was a rarity, a poet who was both honoured and popular in her own lifetime. Critics are often skeptical of poets who are too accessible, so some described her as very good, but not great. A little jealousy that she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award? How dare a poet be a best-selling author. We appreciate her work, which is probably why we have nine or ten of her collections, including one of essays.


Mary Oliver (right) with partner of more than 40 years, Molly Malone Cook (1925–2005)
at the couple’s home in Provincetown, Massachusetts

Oliver wrote about the natural world with remarkable grace and clarity, and she has been compared or included with Transcendentalists of an earlier era such as Thoreau and Emerson. She was also compared with Emily Dickinson because she rarely granted interviews and seemed reclusive.

I loved the nature aspect of her writing, and the emphasis on paying attention as we make our way through this life. Attention is essential to the contemplative life, in whatever expression or spiritual tradition we choose. She was thoughtful about this in a way that made her a favourite "quote" for many a preacher, even though she was ambivalent, at best, about religion for most of her life. It's been said that she reconnected with the Roman Catholicism of her early years after the death of the love of her life, Molly Malone Cook, but I'm not sure if this is true.  There are titles such as Thirst and Evidence which have a spiritual sense to them, at least to this old religious guy.

I am grateful for the life and work of Mary Oliver. May we all pay attention on the journey through this life and into the next.

Here is a link to an NPR On Being radio interview with Mary Oliver from a few years ago  https://onbeing.org/programs/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world/

 To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.



How are you at breaking bad news? Today's Groundling blog
https://groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2019/01/how-to-break-bad-climate-news.html