Alexandersmap

    Tag: Mary Oliver

    • Others

      “In order to be the person I want to be, I must strive, hourly, against the drag of the others.” — Mary Oliver, Sand Dabs, Four*

      Some of them mean well, wanting nothing but the best for us. Some don’t care a lick about what we want, only that a glow might reflect on them. Some mean us nothing but harm in their own devious way, feelings born in some moment of contempt. We learn who some of these characters are over time. Some we go to our graves believing are one but are really the other. In the end they may scarcely matter, or they may matter a great deal. It depends, always, on us.

      We must find our own way. Sometimes this is with the help of others, sometimes despite them. We can’t be carried to our potential, we must reach for it ourselves. This is how we grow into the person we want to become.

    • Building Familiarity

      Everything that was broken has
      forgotten its brokenness. I live
      now in a sky-house, through every
      window the sun. Also your presence.
      Our touching, our stories. Earthy
      and holy both. How can this be, but
      it is. Every day has something in
      it whose name is Forever.
      — Mary Oliver, Felicity

      Recently I received a new laptop computer from the company I work with to replace a Surface Pro that was beginning to show signs of duress (blue screens and such). The nice thing about technology is it’s easily transferrable from device-to-device. Apple seems to have mastered this with iPhone and Mac. The PC world isn’t quite as elegant but the process of transferring your life from one device to another is largely seamless… and yet disruptive at the same time. Fingers tap at places once familiar and now foreign. Something as simple as the angle of your wrists makes all the difference in the world. And don’t get me started on screen sizes.

      We build familiarity in our lives through the action in our days. The chairs we default to when we sit for dinner, where we store the plates or the raucous collection of Tupperware. Which side of the refrigerator holds the ketchup. And of course, how we coexist with life partners, children and pets in this space are what make it a home. When things change, we feel it viscerally. Something is amiss.

      If we’re blessed with a good foundation and sound choices, we might build something that lasts for a very long time. But everything changes when you sprinkle enough days together. Most notably, we change. Our preferences and appetite, our bodies, and those of the characters around us too. We are at once shaped by our environment even as we shape it. Every day has something in it whose name is Forever.

      Every interaction with the world is an opportunity to linger, if only for a little while. Or maybe a lifetime. We have a say in what becomes essential to us. We can’t always control its durability. Familiarity is another form of seeing things through to its natural end. Or maybe ours. This, of course, is our forever.

    • Finding the Way

      Nobody ever says of a painter that he has lost his way. It is said of writers. But when one is talking about a painter one says, “He is finding his way.” — Mary Oliver, Sand Dabs, Six

      The curse of restlessness, as described yesterday, is a burning desire to pile on more and more to the to-do list. How much can we fit in? More, more, more! The worker bee in me seeks to do more. The philosopher in me wishes to still the madness and listen to the universe. The writer in me finds his way tactfully between the two, looking for just the right way to sum up the day.

      And so it is that the words come. Today, before the wave crashes, I delight in the colors in the clouds as I listen to the growing roar. And click publish before I’m swept away.

    • Stories in Time

      Now through the white orchard my little dog
      romps, breaking the new snow
      with wild feet.
      Running here running there, excited,
      hardly able to, stop, he leaps, he spins
      until the white snow is written upon
      in large, exuberant letters,
      a long sentence, expressing
      the pleasures of the body in this world.
      Oh, I could not have said it better
      myself.
      — Mary Oliver, The Storm

      A rafter of wild turkey hens took up residence in the woods prior to the last snowfall. Likely anticipating the snow better than this human could, they opted for the scattered certainty of fallen birdseed from the feeders over the starkness of scratching out a next meal from the deep blanket of fresh snow. Who can blame them? Without a dog for longer than I care to think about, a turkey might find the backyard a relative paradise. This turkey nurtured the land to be just so, for children who have long since migrated. The tracks across the snow break up the blanket as children and Bodhi once did, and I quietly celebrate the contribution to my own tracks.

      Perhaps it’s time to welcome another dog to write its own story in time. Life goes one. We bring to it what we choose.

    • We Begin Again

      You always have two options.
      You can push harder.
      You can remove friction.
      — Greg McKeown

      We all know where we should push harder in our lives to reach personal goals. We also ought to think more about elimination. Shedding ourselves of artificial expectations and dreams that don’t resonate. Moving away from habits, tasks, people or careers that create tremendous friction in our path to a better life. Sometimes we can’t see the gaps because our way is jammed with trivial distractions. We must clear the gap to see how far we must leap.

      So it is that we begin again, reconciling accumulation (bad habits, weight, things, acquaintances, etc.) and the gap between where we are and where we wish to be. This shouldn’t be a once-a-year exercise, it should be a daily reflection. We have our stack of days ahead of us, and the gift of each should be measured and contemplated just the same. But how?

      Intentions are nothing, action is everything. Incremental improvement trumps grand plans, and each day, each bite or sip, each step, each page read, each meaningful conversation and each written word bring us closer to whatever compass heading we’ve set for ourselves. Alternatively, we can incrementally drift off course to a point where major changes are forced upon us. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to make the choice for ourselves instead of having it imposed on us?

      Tell me, what is it you plan to do
      with your one wild and precious life?
      —Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

      Mary Oliver’s words inspire bold dreams, and there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big. But to be attained we must break those dreams down into bite-sized habits. Today, like many of you, I will assess where things are, make a course adjustment and begin again. I won’t do this with bold, unattainable goals with unrealistic timeframes but with a few incremental changes I can track daily. I’ll take the shiny new calendar and map out the big trips and events that should be highlights for the year and identify time to add micro-adventures and brief flings with bolder living.

      Sailors have their log book, and so too should we. Log each day and reflect on it. My personal favorite is the line per day journal, which boils down each day into whatever notable thing you choose to write down. I’ve been doing this for a few years now and strongly recommend it. In fact I just gave each of my kids a LEUCHTTURM1917 Some Lines A Day 5 Year Memory Notebook to begin this habit themselves, but you don’t have to spend much to seed a habit — a simple notebook will do. The point is to begin doing it and never break the streak. Magic ensues.

      This year I’m doubling down on my line per day by adding a picture per day, using an iPhone and an album dedicated just to this. Combined, these habits should be fascinating for me (if perhaps exceedingly dull for the rest of the world). If nothing else, each forces us to add a spark to the moment at hand and wonder to our lives.

      If we don’t step out on the dance floor we’ll forever be wallflowers. You know what’s more fun than stepping out onto the dance floor? Dancing to the dance floor. Remove friction, work hard on what matters most and track progress. Find your groove thing and let it loose. That, friends, will make the New Year meaningful in the end.

    • Diligent Awareness (Life as a Poem)

      “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”
      ― Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

      “Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking you through some lovely countryside. The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, “Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this?” Everything becomes beautiful when you change.” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

      It’s easy to say we should live with awareness, but harder in practice. This business of living demands attention, or rather, distracts our attention from much of the things we’d be focused on if we weren’t so damned busy with that other thing. We forget, sometimes, that life is merely what we pay attention to and everything becomes beautiful when we change. Most of us won’t change or become fully aware, but isn’t it pretty to think so?

      Most don’t want to change, they want to live with what they have, while wishing for more, and do it again tomorrow. When someone does we wonder at their boldness, but don’t connect the dots to doing it ourselves. If we are what we repeatedly do (Aristotle), then doing something completely different strikes at our very identity. No wonder so many refuse to cross that line in the sand.

      “How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.” ― James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

      The thing is, awareness isn’t about turning our lives upside down, it’s being fully present in the moment. Being open to everything that surrounds us, not just those practical considerations. We aren’t quitting our jobs and living like a hermit in a hot tent when we’re aware, we’re simply inviting more of the universe into our present moment. It seems if we want a more fulfilling life then we ought to fill more of our life with beautiful things.

      I was once a closed young man who thought of poetry as frivolous. Something was missing within me that took years to fill. When you close yourself up the world simply cannot find its way in to fill you. Over time my awareness pendulum has swung wide open. Not coincidently, I write more, listen more, seek more and linger more with the world. When we realize the world exists as a poem, we’re more inclined to dance with its verse.

      “Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

      We expand into the world we create for ourselves through diligent awareness. Knowing what we are, and who we are, is the job of a lifetime. When we open ourselves to everything, we discover more, and we live a bigger life.

    • To Be On Our Way

      In the deep fall
      don’t you imagine the leaves think how
      comfortable it will be to touch
      the earth instead of the
      nothingness of air and the endless
      freshets of wind? And don’t you think
      the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
      warm caves, begin to think
      of the birds that will come – six, a dozen – to sleep
      inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
      the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
      the everlasting being crowned with the first
      tuffets of snow? The pond
      vanishes, and the white field over which
      the fox runs so quickly brings out
      its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
      bellows. And at evening especially,
      the piled firewood shifts a little,
      longing to be on its way.
      — Mary Oliver, Song for Autumn

      Autumn whispers to us through trees. For trees, naturally rooted to place, learn a thing or two in their seasons. Whole communities once thrived in places where only trees stand today. Old stone walls and cellar holes, old road beds and grooves in stone that once served as a simple mill. These things become more apparent when we act like trees and linger awhile.

      Humans aren’t rooted to a place, not really, we’re too prone to wandering. In this way, we’re more like the leaves, sailing off to find our place in the wind, eventually landing and becoming a part of the place we settle into in our time. If leaves become loam and feed the forest, don’t we too feed the future in our service to others?

      But there’s a restlessness in many of us. Perhaps remembering our time as leaves and longing to fly once again, a fire burns inside. Our fire, when fully expressed, may transform and carry us to places we couldn’t imagine before we fed the spark. Feed the fire, autumn whispers.

      Surely, ash returns to earth just as leaves do. But how far might it soar before it turns back towards the earth? We live in days, but ought to think in seasons. Everything has its time. The earth awaits.

    • Doing, With Purpose

      “There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker

      “You seem to spend a lot of time worrying if you will survive, and you will probably survive…. It’s the wrong question! The question is how to be useful.” — Peter Drucker to a young Jim Collins (via Nextbigideaclub.com)

      In September, Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay is chock full of bait fish—millions of tiny fish trying to make a go of it in this world, as countless birds and bigger fish attempt to turn that bait fish’s purpose in life to be their breakfast. It’s a fish-eat-fish world on display, and offers lessons for those who witness it. Mostly, it’s a reminder to avoid being a bait fish. For us land-based creatures, the best way to avoid that is to live with purpose.

      We all dabble in those questions of purpose, the “Why are we here? questions. But isn’t that too big a place to start? Purpose is an impossibly big scope to answer with such a broad question. We ought to break it down into bite-sized questions that determine our unique value: “What do I do well? “How can I translate that into serving those who need this value the most?” and “What do I need to learn to become even more valuable for those I wish to serve?” are good starting places for building purpose into our lives.

      It’s fair to ask ourselves why we’re doing something. It’s appropriate to wonder where our work is leading us. And we ought to do something with the answers when we arrive at them, for our opportunity to do useful things resides in a very brief window of time. Feeling the urgency of the moment and doing something with it begins with knowing what both that something and that it really are for us.

      When we leave our lives to chance, we sometimes stumble upon a meaningful life. But more often than not, we end up getting chewed up in the feeding frenzy of life. Purpose brings us higher up the food chain, where we might rise above mere existence to a more valuable destination.

      Which leads back to that question of questions, posed so well by Mary Oliver in her poem The Summer Day:

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

    • Reach

      To understand many things you must reach
      out of your own condition.
      — Mary Oliver, Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way

      There’s a place for nuance. There’s a place for understanding. And above all, there’s a place for meeting in the middle. This inclination to receptiveness runs counter to the toxic stagnation of self-centered.

      There is another virus spreading through the world—it’s a virus of the closed mind. We’ve become closed to new perspectives that might challenge our own. Too many sip the same flavor of Kool-Aid (blue, red, orange seem to be the only flavors at the moment in the U. S.). But a full life doesn’t fit neatly into such rigid choices, does it?

      Like a root-bound plant left too long in its pot, we must reach out of our own condition to grow to our potential.

    • Every Day Has Something

      Everything that was broken has
      forgotten its brokenness. I live
      now in a sky-house, through every
      window the sun. Also your presence.
      Our touching, our stories. Earthy
      and holy both. How can this be, but
      it is. Every day has something in
      it whose name is Forever.
      — Mary Oliver, Everything That Was Broken

      Nobody said life was supposed to be a happily ever after greatest hits package of days to remember. Yet even the most tedious, frustratingly mundane days offers a gift of timelessness. We only have this one, no matter how it goes, and ought to celebrate the smallest sparkle of light just as we celebrate the highlight reel moments that come along, however so infrequently.

      The artists, poets and some not-always-so-poetic blog writers share one thing in common; an appreciation for the moment at hand. For every day has something to offer, should we go looking for it. Every moment offers a gift of possibility. What will forever look like today?