Mary Oliver
American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, found God through being truly present, particularly to the natural world, and in the compassion, love, wonder and gratitude she experienced as a result. *Dr Cath Connelly celebrates one of the great poets of our time, who challenges us with the question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever.
(One or Two Things, Dream Work)
What is it to be truly present? To be so connected to something that its very essence radiates in its exchange between us? What might we see if we were to look into the soul of that tree, that painting, that sunset, that politician?
To truly see is a place of compassion, for compassion is about making the connection between the heart of my being and the heart of your being. American poet Mary Oliver invites us to truly see: “Oh do you have time / to linger / for just a little while / out of your busy / and very important day / for the goldfinches…” (Invitation, Red Bird) and again, “Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, / except that / they have no tongues, could lecture / all day if they wanted about / spiritual patience?” (Landscape, Dream Works).
With her ability to move from the general to the specific, drawing us in to the intimacy of engagement with the smallest detail of her experience, Oliver asks: “Who made the World? / Who made the swan and the black bear? / Who made the grasshopper? / This Grasshopper, I mean - / the one who is eating sugar out of my hand…” (The Summer Day, House of Light) There is an intimacy of presence, of the ability to see, that is here captured so honestly.
Yet Oliver takes us beyond the visual observations of the natural world. She invites us to take the next step, to the vulnerability of feeling, and finds that the natural world can similarly meet us at this place: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.” (Wild Geese, Owls and Other Fantasies)
If seeing takes us to the place of identifying with the other, to know empathy, to the place of interpathy, to truly feel, we find here a place of compassion, for we expose our true selves, and that is of God and that is of love: “oh Lord, / what a lesson / you send me / as I stand / listening / to your rattling, swamp-loving chat / singing / of his simple, leafy life - / how I would like to sing to you / all night / in the dark / just like that.” (The Chat, Thirst)
Oliver loved writing. At the age of thirteen she began penning poetry. She said that she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be caught short again.
One of the delights of reading the poetry of Mary Oliver is the sense that the very next poem will yet again break open some insight into the natural world, and with that the interweaving of her own reaction to this experience.
The reaction to her poetry can be quite visceral. Maybe there should be a warning at the bottom of a previous page that to turn the page might induce an emotional response to the next poem. Thus it was for me with her four-line, one sentence poem: “So every day / I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth / of the ideas of God, / one of which was you.” (So Every Day, Red Bird) My own inclination is to modify this poem, bringing it into the present tense.
Debra Dean Murphy, in her comprehensive article, “Why We Need Mary Oliver’s Poems”, says that Oliver “points readers to the gift of presence, reminding us, in poems that are often deceptively simple, of what it means to attend to what is before us in any given moment. This is also the gift of wonder, of a posture of receptivity that Christians sometimes speak of as part of our vocation – the calling to live more fully into our humanity as persons bearing the imago dei, to mirror the divine dance of mutual presence, mutual receptivity, mutual love.”
Oliver’s own relationship with spiritual topics became quite explicit in her latter years: “It doesn’t have to be / the blue iris, it could be / weeds in a vacant lot, or a few / small stones; just / pay attention, then patch / a few words together and don’t try / to make them elaborate, this isn’t / a contest but the doorway / into thanks, and a silence in which / another voice may speak.” (Praying, Thirst) She frequently posits her observations of the natural world as insights into the nature of God.
Maybe this is the most engaging aspect about Oliver’s poetry, that constantly the reader is invited to find one’s own clarity about the relationship between God and nature.
Is Oliver at risk of anthropomorphism in her delegating emotions to the natural world? Probably. As Debra Dean Murphy says, “Uninterested in a purported inviolable boundary between humans and the nonhuman world, between observer and the observed, she practises anthropomorphism without embarrassment or guile”. It would appear that Oliver concurs with ‘geologian’ Thomas Berry in claiming that nature is the primary revelation of God, a panentheistic world view, described by Matthew Fox as “God is roundabout us completely enveloping us”. God is in all things and all things are in God. This experience of the presence of God in all the blessings and the sufferings of life is a mystical understanding of God. Panentheism is a way of seeing the world sacramentally. “Oh Lord, love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” (Thirst, Thirst)
If this is Oliver’s understanding, then it makes sense of her almost audacious clarity with which she states her reason to exist, that her unique role – call it vocation – is to be utterly present to the natural world, finding connection with this place and articulating it for others. It is with this daring that her opening sentence in the book Thirst is “My work is loving the world”. (Messenger, Thirst). Her deepest gladness is held right there for all to respond to, summed up in so few words, with no necessity for contradiction or prevarication.
It is the same assuredness with which she pens the lines that are possibly most oft-quoted by Oliver readers: “I don’t know exactly what 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?” (The Summer Day, House of Light). It is not just a gentle question; Oliver demands an answer. She picks up on this theme in numerous ways. Elsewhere she insists: “There is only one question: / how to love this world.” (Spring, House of Light).
Maybe this is the question that binds Oliver to remain faithful to her vocation of articulating divinity through observing the natural world? Maybe in response to her own “one wild and precious life” she is holding herself accountable? Certainly a part response to this is when she writes: “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 is 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.” (When Death Comes, New And Selected Poems)
As Annette Allen writes in A Career Overview, “most of the poems bear the unique stamp of an Oliver poem: the solitary speaker bringing her uneasy, questioning spirit to the woods or fields in search of understanding, instruction, even solace”. If Oliver used poetry to work out her life questions and if that poetry was then made public, we, her audience, are the beneficiaries.
This is a slightly edited version of an article which first appeared in the December 2018 edition of The Melbourne Anglican.
*Dr Connelly is a retreat leader, pilgrimage leader, professional Celtic harpist and co-director of the Living Well Centre for Christian Spirituality. She is also author of Handbook of Hope: Emerging Stories Beyond a Disintegrating World, is available for $15 (+ $3pp) through cathy@cathy.com.au
You can find out more about The Living Well Centre for Christian Spirituality at: http://www.livingwellcentre.org.au/about-us/