A Friend and Teacher – Mary Oliver
This is the second of seven pieces meant to introduce our readers to participants in our ordination preparation course at The Seminary of the Christian Community in North America. These students now stand before the last threshold in the priest-training, with ordinations planned for May of 2021. Each one will contemplate a work – or works – of art that speak to their path and Christ’s working in the world in some way.
This week, guest author and ordination preparation student, Jeana Lee, brings us five poems by Mary Oliver. Her piece is really a spoken word piece; a beautiful reflection on each poem and how it has helped, comforted and guided her soul through life – and how these poems can do the same for us. To hear her reflections and her reading of the poems, please go to our patreon site and podcast, The Light in Every Thing.
My name is Jeana Lee and I am a student of the Christian Community Seminary in North America. This year I will be one of the candidates for Ordination. I did my internship in Toronto, and I am a member of the congregation in Spring Valley, NY. Born and raised in Santa Cruz, CA, I attended Smith College in Massachusetts, and spent some formative years in Boulder, CO before becoming a Waldorf high school teacher. My hobbies include nature walks, painting, and making homemade yogurt (having been taught by fellow candidate Mimi Coleman at the Seminary in Toronto).
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) is a well-known and prolific American poet for whom nature walks were not a hobby but a daily part of her work. Nature imagery is a signature part of her poetry, whether from her many years in the Cape Cod region of Massachusetts, or her time in Florida towards the end of life. One short biography can be found here (www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver). To clarify a comment in my audio recording, I never met or corresponded with her, but she became a kind of friend to me through her work. I hope her poems bring you something of what they have given to me.
The Poet, Mary Oliver
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Morning Poem
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches—
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging—
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
Beyond the Snow Belt
Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.
And what else might we do? Let us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Two counties north, to us, is far away, -
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited, - so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.
Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is the landscape that we understand, -
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land.
Lead
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
The Buddha's Last Instruction
“Make of yourself a light”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
The first four poems were published in New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, and the poem, “Lead”, is published in New and Selected Poems, Volume 2, by Mary Oliver.
This is the ‘Arts Wednesday Blog’ of the Seminary of The Christian Community in North America. To learn more about what we are doing at the Seminary of The Christian Community, visit our Patreon site for more content: The Light in Every Thing.
