Married to amazement

It's been a while since I've brought you a Mary Oliver poem and I don't think I've blogged this one before. Oliver understands contemplation like no other:

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's 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.

-- Mary Oliver

Letting go = falling in

Cynthia just sent me the following and I absolutely love it:

Listen, are you breathing just a little,
and calling it a life?...
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

--Mary Oliver

Of course, I've loved just about every line Mary Oliver has ever put to paper. Reading her poetry is on my "self-soothing/uplift" list.
~~~

Celebrating June

Here's a really wonderful poem that brings us to mindfulness about the season:

Honey Locust

Who can tell how lovely in June is the
honey locust tree, or why
a tree should be so sweet and live
in this world? Each white blossom
on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed—
a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flowers
holds a flask
of fragrance called Heaven, which is never sealed.
The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy
with gratitude. They are working like farmers. They are as
happy as saints. After awhile the flowers begin to
wilt and drop down into the grass. Welcome
shines in the grass.

Every year I gather
handfuls of blossoms and eat of their mealiness; the honey
melts in my mouth, the seeds make me strong,
both when they are crisp and ripe, and even at the end
when their petals have turned dull yellow.

So it is
if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is
not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams
all the way to the grave.

From New and Selected Poems, Volume Two by Mary Oliver

"Gladness gleams/all the way to the grave." Isn't that wonderful? This truly is the payoff for having a disciplined meditative practice. We learn to live in gladness all of our life - until the very moment of death.

The above poem represents a contemplation exercise. Through meditative and contemplative practices we learn to notice our surroundings in both a deep and detailed way. Mary Oliver models this for us. What a delight she is!

LANDSCAPE

by Mary Oliver

Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn't it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing as though they were the
most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky–as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

Birth and new life

If you want to work on visualization as a meditative practice, you cannot do much better than to spend time with the poetry of Mary Oliver. Her ability to evoke an image with words is simply unsurpassed:

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

Valentine's Day

This is a powerful observation about how love works and it strikes me as exactly right:

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.

- Mary Oliver

Letting go

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.

- Mary Oliver

"to let it go"

Ah, here's another Mary Oliver poem. Enjoy:

In Blackwater Woods


Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river
of loss
whose other side
is salvation,

whose meaning
none of
us will ever know.
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.

Isn't that a perfect last line? That's what we are about: learning to let it go, whatever "it" is.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

-- Mary Oliver

Seeking calmness

Here's a description about how being in nature can help us settle our minds. It's another excerpt from Coming to our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

No wonder when we seek calmness, so many of us find it in nature. The natural world has no artifice. The tree outside the window, and the birds in it, stand only in the now, remnants of what was once pristine wilderness, which was and is, where it is still protected, timeless on the scale of the human. The natural world always defines now. We instinctively feel a part of nature because our forebears were born of it and into it, and the natural world was the only world, all there was, It offered a multiplicity of experiential dimensions for its inhabitants, all of which needed to be understood to survive, including what they sometimes called the spirit world, or the world of the gods, worlds that could be sensed even though they were usually invisible.

Changing seasons, wind and weather, light and night, mountains, rivers, trees, oceans and ocean currents, fields, plants and animals, wilderness and the wild speak to us even now. They invite us and carry us back into the present that they define and are always in (and we too, except that we forget). They help us to focus and to attend to what is important, remind us, in Mary Oliver's elegantly turned phrase, of "our place in the family of things."

May the arrival of spring help us all remember "our place in the family of things." Last week I saw my first robin and the peach tree in front of my little house is in bloom. Such things are reference points for us as the year turns and progresses. May each of these reference points in nature bring us to true calmness.