Friday, April 23 “The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion”
A long-time Jesuit soul friend, Bill Pauly, who died, too young in 2006 (heart attack), gave me Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Vol 1 in 2004 when I drove to Santa Clara, CA for sabbatical after 3 years as interim dean of Liberal Arts & Education. Knowing that I had not embraced Mary Oliver’s poetry despite his advising, he wrote on the title page:
“This is your one required reading for your sabbatical. Enjoy.”
Here I am, all these years later, wanting to find some message board to where Bill’s spirit and his memory lives now, telling him that I’ve finally gotten his point. I must like her poetry.
It’s a good poem for Spring, with its sensual and unpredictable apparitions – fresh beauty and vitality during these weeks; even grumpiness at the season’s waves of pollen assaulting our nostrils and lungs, even those discomforts can be stopped in their tracks by sheer sexy beauty.
“. . . . I do not want anymore to be useful . . . to lead children . . . into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.”
Mary O. reminds me of a prayer I learned 40 + years ago on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation. If I stand still — still enough and long enough — I can hear the sound a cottonwood makes, and a different sound of grass growing beneath my feet. The stillness and the listening help me to be where I stand and walk upon the earth.
It helps to read strong poems out loud, several times.
Have a blest weekend,
john sj
Today’s post: “Early Morning, My Birthday”
The snails on the pink sleds of their bodies are moving
among the morning glories.
The spider is asleep among the red thumbs
of the raspberries.
What shall I do, what shall I do?
The rain is slow
The little birds are alive in it.
Even the beetles.
The green leaves lap it up.
What shall I do, what shall I do?
The wasp sits on the porch in her paper castle.
The blue heron floats out of the clouds.
The fish leaps, all rainbow and mouth, from the dark water.
This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think,
than the lilies of Monet. And I do not want anymore to be useful,
to be docile,
to lead children out of the fields into the text of civility,
to teach them that they are (they are not) better
than the grass.
Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (1992)
“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything – other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion – that standing within this otherness – the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books – can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”
Mary Oliver
1935-2019