Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.
“I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life” by Mary Oliver, via Red Bird: Poems, Beacon Press.
(originally shared 04/29/2016)
Ms. Oliver died yesterday, January 17, 2019. She was 83.
She is the reason Words for the Year exists.
She will be missed.
Krista Tippet did a beautiful (and rare) interview–“Listening to the World”–with Ms. Oliver in 2015. You may listen and read the transcript at OnBeing.org.
Maria Popova at Brain Pickings has often written on Ms. Oliver. Read Popova’s piece “Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate” and also listen to Ms. Oliver read her iconic poem “Wild Geese” (the first poem I ever posted here.)
Words for the Year 
I was heartbroken to hear of Mary Oliver’s passing yesterday. What a loss! The world is a darker place without her. 😥 The poet Alison Luterman wrote yesterday: “What a bright light Mary Oliver was and is, and how much we treasure what she gave us. I hope she’s in a sunlit field now, with bees and birds and deer and foxes and long grass, and a beloved dog nearby.”
Her NY Times obituary quoted from her 2011 interview in O: The Oprah Magazine, where she talked about having been sexually abused as a child. She said, “I had a very dysfunctional family and a very hard childhood, so I made a world out of words. It was my salvation.” I love that she made a world out of words, and that it was her salvation. And I love that she’s the reason Words for the Year Exists. ❤
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 the 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 the 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
LikeLiked by 6 people
Perfect, Mike. Perfect.
I am still searching for words. Thank you for yours.
❤️
LikeLiked by 1 person
I thought of you when I saw the news. This website first introduced me to her – what a beautiful gift you gave me.
LikeLike
When, as an adult, I decided to take writing poetry seriously, Mary Oliver was my model. I shamelessly imitated her until my own style developed. I could not have had a better beginning. I simply would not be who I am without her poems and her Handbook. I am grateful for what she gave me, gave us.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: The Reasons We Read | Books Here And There
This morning when I woke, Mary Oliver was still alive in my world.
You see, I had unplugged from the “noise” of the world yesterday, as I seem to do more and more, so I had not yet heard the news of her passing.
My dear sweet friend, Michelle knows my cave-dwelling tendencies and shared the news with me this morning by texting me a couple of links about Oliver’s passing.
My first thought was, “83? She was so young.”
My second thought was, “Lymphoma? That’s what my little Spot girl had.” I had written a poem actually after my Spot dog’s diagnosis very reminiscent of Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”
My third thought was, “I have to write something back, say something…” but I couldn’t find any words. Even with Michelle, all I could text were pithy sad-face emoticons and a heart. I finally said, “thank you for telling me.”
You see, she and I have recently been mulling over if we are Red Pill sort of persons or Blue Pill people. (You remember The Matrix right? Red Pill shows you the truth, pulls back the curtain, steals your naivety…The red pill is the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge. The Blue Pill lets you “stay asleep,” let’s you stay blissfully unaware, keeps the cancer diagnosis a secret, turns off the news station before stories of another world catastrophe. The Blue Pill lets you go on thinking your favorite poet is still alive.
Michelle and I are both Red Pill girls.
But this morning, I wanted to go back and choose the Blue Pill.
But either way, Mary Oliver would still be gone. Physically. Her words remain. My memories of her remains. The idea of her remains…and isn’t that how we all knew her, anyway? Through her words and recordings and books and our ideas of her? So what’s changed? That’s what I try to ask myself. I never knew her. She saved my life, yes…multiple times…but she never knew that, she never knew me.
But maybe she did.
Maybe on some sleepy Sunday morning, just for fun, she googled the name of one of her poems. Maybe she somehow mysteriously landed here, or on a previous blog of mine in a past lifetime where I lamented my little dog Spot and the lymphoma I knew would steal her from me. Maybe she thought of her own little dog Percy and maybe shed a tear for both of our losses, maybe she smiled serenely when she read how she saved my life and how grateful I would forever be for her, for her words.
Maybe she even looks over my shoulder now as I type this at my dining room table, the washing machine spinning on cold cycle, my new little dog laying on the kitchen rug looking up at me As though I were just as wonderful, as the perfect moon. The other dog on the sofa asleep and oblivious to the news of the world. The robins hopping around my backyard, the swallows imploring me to fill the feeder, the thrush singing “of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything,” the poinsettia on the counter desperately clinging to life, the floor that needs sweeping, the words that wouldn’t come and now won’t stop, just like the tears, the stupid little tears for someone I never met. The cows moo in the distance telling me to cry on my own time, that now is the time I’m supposed to go feed them. Maybe Oliver looks over my shoulder, nudges me up from my chair, and says, “Enough of that, Christina, you have work to do. ‘Your work is loving the world.’ Over and over again.”
You, gentle reader, will probably end up seeing my comment again, revised into a future post. But I wanted to share my unedited thoughts here as they tumbled into my head. I wanted to try to process my grief, here, with you. Because if you are reading this, you too are trying to process your own grief. But alas the world spins madly on. For me, and for you, too.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
from “Wild Geese”
Goodbye Ms. Oliver, and just in case you really ARE reading over my shoulder, Thank you. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for reminding me what matters most.
“Messenger”
by Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
(Published in Thirst)
LikeLiked by 4 people
Thank you for this, Christy. What you wrote is so beautiful. I could relate. It feels weird to be grieving so deeply the loss of this woman I’ve never met. I love that Mary Oliver’s poetry saved your life more than once. ❤ I would love to hear about that if you ever feel inspired to share. I went to Quaker meeting this morning, and a woman shared about Mary Oliver's passing and her poetry. I shared and recited from heart the only Mary Oliver poem I can recite from heart, which I really love ("The Uses of Sorrow"). It felt good. 🙂
There are two tributes to Mary Oliver published since her passing that I enjoyed:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/mary-oliver-deep-direct-love-for-the-world?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&fbclid=IwAR0ur_n_ZbI3Qmbkmz6TWKGviZb1oyEr_hw-_ublkqSu7NctB5l5Kd71YOg
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/mary-oliver-did-something-rare-she-made-poetry-accessible-thats-not-a-bad-thing/2019/01/18/6aacf3ee-1b2d-11e9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html?fbclid=IwAR0vXuFvS678z6TTxFEWXjn0UaXwqkzWpq6PWM3DeZbUWFvlZRJ-rmi40rw&noredirect=on&utm_term=.9afebbd0bc77
LikeLike
I was drinking my second round of tea in a messy over-crowded morning, when I read about Mary Oliver’s death on NPR. Like you, I never met Oliver, if we talk about physical meet-ups. She, though, saved my life on so many occasions that I feel I knew her all my life.
Next two hours, I kept checking twitter, instagram, and facebook- New Yorker, NPR, New York times books- articles, favorite poems, and the hashtags with her name. No hashtags were developed. And I felt- Really!! all these stupid pop cultures things draw so much attention, but Oliver’s quiet passing didn’t even create a single crack in that black whole of social media.
next one hour- I felt heaviness in my stomach as if my fingers wanted to connect some dots for her..maybe a photograph that I took while reading Oliver( so many times I carried her books for long drives and lone hikes), maybe a little poem..
I wrote this on my blog- just a few words because loss makes me silent..yet I wanted words to be out..
How you carry heavy things
————————————–
When I will get my heart back
I will show you the black dots of loss
That don’t fade.
It’s uncanny how sorrow remains so faithful
And love breaks
And all the people you admired once disappear too
Leaving their rhythms, and words.
It’s on you- how you carry heavy things-
Your grief, swollen heart, and poetry books.
—————————————–
I will miss Mary Oliver. And whenever I will miss her, I will search her in her written words.
LikeLike
Dear Christina,
Thank You For This Place.
Love,
Jean McKay
❤
LikeLike
ABUNDANCE
in memory of Mary Oliver
It’s impossible to be lonely
when you’re zesting an orange.
Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room
fills with fruit.
Look around: you have
more than enough.
Always have.
You just didn’t notice
until now.
— Amy Schmidt
LikeLike
Insurance
Driving down Arlington Ave.,
past the Parent Navel Orange Tree,
near Planned Parenthood
and Pic N Save, I would always
notice a sign for an insurance
office that read
MARY OLIVER
Life-Auto-Fire-Health.
I knew the poet
lived on the East coast,
but I loved to think I would find her
inside, rhapsodizing over claim
forms and Polaroids of water
damage, adjusting
to California as she
adjusted numbers,
helping people protect
their wild and precious lives.
One day, driving to the farmers’
market in the Sears parking lot,
I noticed the sign said
MARV Oliver.
That V hit me right
between the eyes, sharp
as an arrow. I worried
someone had shaved the tail
off Mary’s Y, worried a brother
had wrested her business away.
More likely, I knew, I had been
misreading the sign
all the while, hoping
to find the poet in this
arid region, hoping she could help
me find the beauty
along this industrial strip
with its rangy palm trees,
its fenced-in belly-
button fruit.
I drove on ahead to the farmers’ market,
in search of blackberries, honey,
the heaven of appetite, knowing
if Mary Oliver did own
an insurance company,
underneath her name would read
Life-Life-Life-Life.
— Gayle Brandeis
LikeLike
Pingback: Meet Virginia: A Healthy Dose of Something New – Michelle R. Terry
Pingback: Love Love Love, says Percy – A Courage Way of Life