More Mary Oliver
Feb. 1st, 2025 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
It is the weekend, so a break from Chodron to read Mary Oliver. This section of the book Winter Hours is fewer essays but more poems. The one essay introduces a poem about swans and talks about some of the principles she uses in her poetry, which include having a sincere energy, having a spiritual purpose, containing some moment of earthly delight, and asking a question that the reader must answer. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to her poetry; the combination of the earthly and the spiritual really draws me in.
I hadn't read any of the poems in this section before, and I'm not going to type them all out here, but there were a couple of lines I loved. In "The Swan," there is this line: "Said Mrs. Blake of the poet, "I miss my husband's company. He is so often in paradise. Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down it flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive the world". Poor Mrs. Blake, whose husband was occupied with contemplation of the beauties of the universe! An early example of a football widow, only with poetry. It does make me wonder if Oliver herself was married.
It also points to the idea that poetry is ultimately a way of seeing. I do love the corporeality of Oliver's spirituality; I think that's what makes her accessible, since many of use experience joy in the beauties of nature, and in a way she's just highlighting that.
The other lines I loved in this section were from "Moss:" "Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory but something far older--a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory. Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything. To perceive of the earth as round needed something else--standing up!--that hadn't yet happened....[W]hen I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly. sweet cousin."
I recently saw something on tumblr talking about how we share 25% of our DNA with trees, so we are genetically related to plants. I do love that idea of our fellowship with plants and animals.
Reading her process for writing poetry made me think I should stretch my own creative muscles a little.
Seeking the light:
Daybreak for me began, this sabbath day, with a phone call reminder to order my CPAP supplies,
then the little steel box that connects me to the world gave me a beautiful image:
the Northern Lights in Iceland.
Solar Storms brought the Northern lights here,
or so they said,
but only the camera's eye, not mine,
could see them.
Better to see on my little screen, where the line between illusions and reality is no longer clear--
is this a hallucination dreamed by a computer, or a hallucination dreamed by me?
Today my friend starts out on a journey to Yellowknife, Canada
to see the Northern Lights in person.
She's been to Iceland and eaten the rotting shark
but the lights eluded her then.
Perhaps she will find them now.
Is seeking the experience of the real worthwhile?
I hadn't read any of the poems in this section before, and I'm not going to type them all out here, but there were a couple of lines I loved. In "The Swan," there is this line: "Said Mrs. Blake of the poet, "I miss my husband's company. He is so often in paradise. Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down it flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive the world". Poor Mrs. Blake, whose husband was occupied with contemplation of the beauties of the universe! An early example of a football widow, only with poetry. It does make me wonder if Oliver herself was married.
It also points to the idea that poetry is ultimately a way of seeing. I do love the corporeality of Oliver's spirituality; I think that's what makes her accessible, since many of use experience joy in the beauties of nature, and in a way she's just highlighting that.
The other lines I loved in this section were from "Moss:" "Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory but something far older--a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory. Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything. To perceive of the earth as round needed something else--standing up!--that hadn't yet happened....[W]hen I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly. sweet cousin."
I recently saw something on tumblr talking about how we share 25% of our DNA with trees, so we are genetically related to plants. I do love that idea of our fellowship with plants and animals.
Reading her process for writing poetry made me think I should stretch my own creative muscles a little.
Seeking the light:
Daybreak for me began, this sabbath day, with a phone call reminder to order my CPAP supplies,
then the little steel box that connects me to the world gave me a beautiful image:
the Northern Lights in Iceland.
Solar Storms brought the Northern lights here,
or so they said,
but only the camera's eye, not mine,
could see them.
Better to see on my little screen, where the line between illusions and reality is no longer clear--
is this a hallucination dreamed by a computer, or a hallucination dreamed by me?
Today my friend starts out on a journey to Yellowknife, Canada
to see the Northern Lights in person.
She's been to Iceland and eaten the rotting shark
but the lights eluded her then.
Perhaps she will find them now.
Is seeking the experience of the real worthwhile?