Alexandersmap

    Tag: Mary Oliver

    • Live in the Open-Mindedness

      I live in the open mindedness
      of not knowing enough
      about anything.
      — Mary Oliver, Luna

      There’s a liberation in knowing your limitations in this world. Understanding what you don’t know offers a fork in the road to either learn more or move on and embrace your ignorance. Which we choose is determined by who we want to be, or who we must be.

      I was presented a wine list by a waiter during a team dinner at a high end restaurant. Scanning the list, I quickly found the familiar wines. And hundreds of wines I’d never heard of before, each categorized in general groupings based on the region of the world they came from. Determined to try something new, I welcomed the sommelier who quickly rattled off a few questions that brought us to a bottle. The sommelier and I each met that fork in the road at different points in time. Sometime in his past he embraced learning about each of those hundreds of bottles. When I reached that same fork he was right there to guide me. And every other name and region on that extensive list faded away from my mind.

      Not knowing enough about anything and knowing just enough about something aren’t so different. Being open-minded about experiencing what the world brings you offers opportunity. Experience develops the confidence to accept what you’ll never know.

    • Playing At the Edges of Knowing

      I believe I will never quite know.
      Though I play at the edges of knowing,
      truly I know
      our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving,
      which is the way I walked on,
      softly,
      through the pale-pink morning light.
      — Mary Oliver, Bone

      Like the beach Mary Oliver walked in this poem, life ebbs and flows. We either surf the rip or get pulled under by it. This latest period of chaos could overwhelm us or strengthen our resolve to persevere in the face of it.

      We never quite know all that we seek to understand. Just when we think we’ve got it figured out the world throws another curveball at you. Coming out of a pandemic, thinking that things will finally get better and… they don’t. Not yet anyway. You know that this too shall pass, somehow. But life asks us to wait just a bit longer still. Or life tells you that your time has come, sooner than you expected it to. Just when you thought you’d arrived.

      Our part is not meant to be easy. Our part is not knowing, but staying with it anyway. Our part is to support one another in the face of uncertainty.

      Amor Fati, or “love of fate”, is the stoic’s answer to these times. Amor is not quite right. We don’t have to love our fate. But accepting it frees us to focus on the moments we have together. While there’s still time.

    • A Wednesday Walk in the Woods

      “Listen! Let the high branches go on with their opera, it’s the song of the fields I wait for, when the sky turns orange and the wind arrives, waving his thousand arms.” — Mary Oliver, Wind

      The woods were quiet save for the steady clump, swish, click of this clydesdale making his way through the fields and woods on snowshoes. The snow had transformed from powdery bliss Sunday to snowball clingy in the warm sun. In New England you work with whatever Mother Nature gives you, and a lunch walk on a warmish day brought isolation from humanity and companionship from thousands of naked old friends biding their time to bud in Spring.

      Steadily I make my way through the forest to revisit favorite spots. I have memories of who I once was in certain places, for the trail whispers. Why do we settle on the familiar so often, when the world offers so much to discover? The trick when walking in familiar woods is to look for the different. The most obvious tell was the snow itself, tracks and consistency completely transformed in a few days, and it will be again on every visit.

      Autumn leaves lay scattered near a dug-up clump of snow. Deer tracks? No… Canine. The tracks and leaves tell the rest of the story. I realize I’m telling my own story with every step. I wonder who might read it? The trees stand stoic and unmoved.

      I climb up a small rise on virgin snow. Something catches my eye and I walk closer for a look. Someone built a lean-to between two oak trees, with netting and fallen tree branches making up the roof. This wasn’t new, just unnoticed on prior walks. They’d wanted it that way, of course, building it up away from the trail. I wondered at the builder for a moment, and left the mystery unsolved. The world is full of questions, I don’t feel compelled to answer every one of them.

      Turning back, I recalled this line of poetry from Mary Oliver about tree branches waving in the breeze. We know this song, the woods and I. Looking around one last time I look for an excuse to linger. They stand in cold indifference and show me the way home.

      Biding their time

    • A Moment With Snow

      Aren’t there moments
      that are better than knowing something,
      and sweeter? Snow was falling,
      so much like stars
      filling the dark trees
      that one could easily imagine
      its reason for being was nothing more
      than prettiness.
      — Mary Oliver, Snowy Night

      I know I have some readers in other parts of the world where snow is a distant memory or an impossibility. You might wonder why we carry on so much about the stuff, and it’s hard to nail down the reasons for the delight when we finally get snow again. While most of us have a love/hate relationship with it for all the joy and misery it brings, I think of it as an old friend that’s been gone too long.

      Oliver’s quote is from a magical poem about encountering an owl on a snowy night. I quote Oliver poems perhaps more than I should in this blog, but I believe in mixing wonder into our lives. Oliver had a keen eye for the stuff, and jumbled her words just so to share it with you and me and generations who we haven’t imagined yet. That’s magic in itself, isn’t it?

      You develop a nose for snow, and sense when it’s coming. You prepare for it as best you can, doing the yard work you put off way longer than you should have, move the shovels into a more convenient place, and the snowblower too if you have one. And then you wait for the first flakes to begin drifting from the sky, probing the land like a pilot probing a channel. Soon the rest follow and the world transforms before your eyes. Snow brings new perspective on a place you’ve come to see a certain way. Like a poem, really, that’s dropped on you at just the right moment.

    • Writing to Schubert

      How many hours
      do I sit here
      aching to do

      what I do not do
      when, suddenly,
      he throws a single note

      higher than the others
      so that I feel
      the green field of hope,

      and then, descending,
      all this world’s sorrow,
      so deadly, so beautiful.
      – Mary Oliver, Schubert

      Today is the anniversary of the death of Franz Schubert, who passed away at the shockingly young age of 31 on the 19th of November 1828. It’s shocking because of how much he accomplished in such a short span of time. Not so shocking when you consider the state of modern medicine at the time: he was treated with mercury to cure what was believed to be syphilis. I’m grateful for a lot of things in my life — being born at a time where medical treatment is a bit less hit or miss is right up there on my list. But having better treatment options guarantees nothing. We still must produce while we can.

      The inspiration with Schubert is in the mastery he had reached in his last few years. It’s something we can draw from in our own creative lives, as Mary Oliver clearly did, and I regret not leveraging his soundtrack more often myself. But then again it all comes to us at different times, doesn’t it? We all reach that point of creative inspiration when we wake up and finally see the truth. If Schubert offers any warning from his grave, it’s that we shouldn’t wait. Memento Mori.

      Schubert’s brief and brilliant life informs: we can do a lot in a relatively brief amount of time. And surely, there’s still time to do it today. But maybe not tomorrow. Carpe diem. Now get to work.

    • Moments and Answers

      Aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?

      At 4:30 in the morning, I realized I was unable to sleep any longer as I became increasingly aware of the fan tap-tap-tapping me to alertness. This wake-up hour is becoming a disturbing trend, and I fought it as long as I felt reasonable until I surrendered to the noise and got up well before the sun and read Mary Oliver’s poem Snowy Night, thinking it might draw me back to sleep.

      Just the opposite, it turned out. So I decided to make the most of the unexpected time awake and drove to the sea to catch the rising sun meet the falling tide. The hope was to let the waves sweep away this bout of restlessness.

      I love this world, but not for its answers.

      I don’t understand the draw of inland places. Sure, they’re nice to visit for awhile, but I couldn’t live there. I’ve come to rely on salt water too much to be that far away from it. It draws something out of you. If not always answers, well, maybe moments.

      This post may not have all the answers (does any?), but I’ve hung on to it all day. I’ll take this moment to click publish. Cheers.

    • To Squander the Day

      We are reconciled, I think,
      to too much.
      Better to be a bird, like this one-
      An ornament of the eternal.
      As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,
      “Squander the day, but save the soul,”
      I heard him say.
      – Mary Oliver, The Lark

      We become especially adept at committing ourselves to activities with the least return on our time invested. What is an unproductive meeting but an agreement between two parties to squander time? As if we had the time to spend.

      This challenge by Mary Oliver, declaring that we reconcile to too much in our days, pokes deeply at that inner doubt we might have about how we’re spending our time. That (now) she’s challenging us from the grave amplifies the message. Jealously guard your time for that which is most important. Squander the day, if you must, but save your soul!

      We take stock of our calendars and see a growing trend back to the office, back to travel and meetings and getting things done. Some excites us, and some is a reconciliation to the mission at hand. This is the life of a professional, we do what we must to get where we want to be in our careers.

      But what if we saved our soul instead?

    • Among the Trees (for Pops)

      When I am among the trees,
      especially the willows and the honey locust,
      equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
      they give off such hints of gladness,
      I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

      I am so distant from the hope of myself,
      in which I have goodness, and discernment,
      and never hurry through the world
      but walk slowly, and bow often.

      Around me the trees stir in their leaves
      and call out, “stay awhile.”
      The light flows from their branches.

      And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
      “and you too have come
      into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
      with light, and to shine.”
      – Mary Oliver, When I Am Among the Trees

      A year flies by, doesn’t it? And beneath it all, carried quietly, my own grief and sense of loss. Buried so that others might bear their own.

      You knew the trees and taught us to see them too. And you taught us the simple joy of being alive while there’s time. And, as Mary Oliver puts it so much better than I, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.

      Today, among the trees, we’ll remember you again (as if we ever forgot). To feel you stir in the breeze and see the mischief carried on in the eyes of those who knew you best. We’ll close this one chapter and begin the next, knowing you’ve never really left us. Not really. For you’ve filled us with light.

    • An Allegiance With Gravity

      Rivers and stones are forever
      in allegiance with gravity
      while we ourselves dream of rising.
      – Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes

      How do you explain yourself when someone jokingly asks you the question, “You don’t watch TV, what do you do?” I heard that question yesterday, smiled and said I keep busy. For how do you tell someone who is so deeply focused on one thing that you choose to use your time in other ways?

      In a bit of indulgence this week, I purchased some beautiful new Petzl crampons. This is a nod to supply chain challenges in the world, to the changing seasons and anticipation of winter hiking, but also an acknowledgement that I just can’t get out there to hike right now. For now, anyway, I’m investing my brief, fragile time in other ways.

      I visited the homes of three family members this week (including the television fan’s), each with some work that must be done and nobody to do it. In each case, knowing that if I’m not doing the work it’s going to get punted down the field indefinitely. So instead the hiking gets punted, at least for a little while. Autumn hiking is too crowded anyway… right?

      “What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do” – John Ruskin

      I dream of rising: Of winter hiking and digging these new crampons into an icy incline. Of traversing beautiful ridge line. Of travel and visits to faraway places. And (sometimes) of finally watching some program I’ve heard so much about from people in the know. But for now there’s work to be done. And at the moment I’m in an allegiance with gravity.

    • Until We Are Not

      The singular and cheerful life
      of any flower
      in anyone’s garden
      or any still unowned field—
      if there are any—
      catches me
      by the heart,
      by its color, by its obedience
      to the holiest of laws:
      be alive
      until you are not.
      – Mary Oliver, The Singular and Cheerful Life

      We all have gut punches along the way. Moments of bliss interrupted by the fiercest of reality checks. Moments when you question the unfairness of it all. Look around at the world and you’ll find plenty of examples of it today.

      What do we do when we catch our breath from this gut punch?

      We generally find a way to carry on. To make the most of our brief time together. To spin up just a little more magic in the world, if only to reflect in the glow it creates between us. To be alive until we are not.

      There is only this.