Attention is the Beginning of Devotion: The Life and Work of Mary Oliver

The great poet Mary Oliver recently died. I have over the years shared several pieces of her work in the worship I create. I am not unique in this. she has been a staple diet for Unitarian worship for many years. So in honour of her life I thought I would share a few selected pieces of her work here and explore some of the spiritual lessons that are contained within it. I thought I'd begin with a little devotional  piece of hers on prayer. For as she has said "attention is the beginning of devotion"

“Praying” by Mary Oliver

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 and grew up in a small town in Ohio in the USA. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among her many honors and published numerous collections of poetry and also some prose. She lived and wrote for five decades in Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. Her poetry was vivid with a sense of place. She wrote about what she witnessed, but with compassion and empathy, she was never a dispassionate observer. After an illness and the death of her longtime partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, Mary Oliver moved to southern Florida where she spent her final few years.

I did not grow up with a love for poetry,but because Mary’s was so easily accessible, conversational with no gimmicks. I engaged with hers easily when I first heard it. I know I am not alone in this as it was her style and her ability to touch the reader deeply and spiritually that is the reason why she has been so loved. She asked the questions that so many folk ask. Her poetry has become a gateway to so many other great poets for me, although interestingly poets of similar vein. She has been described as an ecstatic poet very much in the vein of her idols Shelley, Keats, and Whitman. Nature and the observation and connection to it became a gateway to the sacred for Mary. Her poems feel like devotional prayer. As she has said herself “attention is the beginning of devotion.” This is beautifully exemplified in one of her most loved poems “The Summer Day”:

"The Summer Day"

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

There is something beautiful, simple and humble in her words. Her work is real, something I identify with deeply; the spiritual has to be real for me, or not at all. This beautiful, life affirming poem grew from her empathically observing her own life and experiences. Having observed the life in front of her she asks the question “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” To her this is religious, devotional living, “attention is the beginning of devotion”

In a conversation with Krista Tippett recorded for “OnBeing” she said of the poem.

“One thing about that poem, which I think is important, is that the grasshopper actually existed. And yet I was able to fit him into that poem. And the sugar he was eating was part of frosting from a Portuguese lady’s birthday cake, which wasn’t important to the poem. But even seeing that little creature come to my plate and say, I’d like a little helping of that. It somehow fascinates me that — that’s just personal for me that it was Mrs. Segura, probably her 90th birthday cake or something.”

Yes for Mary “attention is the beginning of devotion.” Here follows a couple more pieces of her work.

"The Sun"

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

“The Ponds”

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them —

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight —
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away —
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

She was a poet in the old fashioned style, certainly no desk or computer to write on, she shunned such things, instead preferring the freedom of stalking the woods, with a note pad in hand, and dog by her side. Something which began during her childhood, as she played truant from school and fled home. She would walk the woods with Whitman in her knapsack. Here she felt free as she escaped a deeply unhappy home life. The whole family suffered at the hands of a sexually abusive father and a neglectful mother. As she told Krista Tippett. “To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings.” From the age of thirteen she “made a world out of words,” which became her salvation, it saved her life.

It was during this childhood that she developed her personal faith in God, although an indefinable one, along with her scepticism towards organised religion. At Sunday school she rejected many of the tenets of her faith, such as the resurrection. Even so she said she was probably more interested in religious question than most of her class mates, who accepted the teachings. As she become enchanted by nature, by its endless cycles of birth and death and during those walks in the wood, she developed her creative method. She paid devotional attention to whatever happened to present itself to her. She became like the Sufi mystic Rumi, one of her heroes, she sought to combine the spiritual life with the concrete. As she wrote: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Thus she perceived the world around her as voices of creation. Each plant, each animal, each bird became a divine messenger. Just like in the creation story she saw that it was from the dirt that all life was created and thus she speaks of the dirt in a divine sense. She speaks of the God of dirt, that through the dirt she hears the divine voice. As she expresses in the following poem “One or Two Things”:

“One or Two Things”

Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.
The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening

to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,

which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning—some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.

But to lift the hoof!
For that you need
an idea.

Here follows a reflection by  Parker J Palmer on Mary’s poem “Spring”. Palmer’s reflection is titled” “Loving the World Means Paying Attention to Its Simple Gifts” It appeared as Facebook memory this week. He had published it last year.

“Loving the World Means Paying Attention to Its Simple Gifts” by Parker J Palmer

This Mary Oliver gem may be the finest poem about spring — and how we live our lives — I’ve ever read. There are no cardinals or crocuses here. Only a black bear awakening from hibernation, coming down the mountain, showing her “perfect love” by doing what bears do.

“There is only one question,” says Mary Oliver: “how to love this world.” You’ll find your own answer to the poet’s question, your own sense of meaning in her words.

For me, the poem opens into mystery. How could it not, since it’s about the “dazzling darkness” that’s forever coming down the mountain toward us?

But this much seems clear. Loving the world means paying attention to its simple gifts, and receiving them with simple gratitude in every moment of our waking lives.

"Spring" by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.


Here follow's one of Mary’s classic poems. I’ve had a love for Geese ever since I first heard it. They’ve helped me to find and ref-find my place in the family of things many times.

“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.

Throughout her life Mary found great solace in nature. In her later years though I feel that she found herself much more intimately at home with people. As she has said as she has grew older she entered more fully into the human world and embraced it. As time past she gained a deepr clarity about her own life and the life of others. This in part was due no doubt to the death of her long term partner Molly, as she wrote “The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.”

She explored this in one of her later pieces “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”, while recovering from cancer:

The question is,
what will it be like
after the last day?
Will I float
into the sky
or will I fray
within the earth or a river -
remembering nothing?
How desperate I would be
if I couldn't remember
the sun rising, if I couldn't
remember trees, rivers; if I couldn't
even remember, beloved,
your beloved name.

Towards the end of her 2015 interview with Krista Tippett Mary was asked about her current spiritual life, Krista asked: “you’ve said somewhere you’ve become more spiritual as you’ve grown older. What do you mean when you say that? What’s the content of that?

To which Mary answered “I’ve become kinder, more people-oriented, more willing to grow old. I always was investigative in terms of everlasting life, but a little more interested now, a little more content with my answers.”

This seems like a rather lovely ending for this "blogspot" reflecting on the life of Mary Oliver. I will though offer one final poem in which she kind of explores the questions. It is a classic and goes by the title “Daisies”

“Daisies” by Mary Oliver

It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead
oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their - if you don't
mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example - I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.