Poet Mary Oliver is fond of three things.
She is actually fond of many more than three things, if you read her poetry. Nature, for one. Grasshoppers, for another. This grasshopper more than any other.
Poets move from the particular to the universal, from this to all. They understand that you don’t love marriage, you love being married (if you are and if you do) to your husband — and not just any husband (we hope), but yours, the one named Joe who wrinkles his nose just so when he looks at you over the morning paper, at which point you notice the hairs growing out of that same nose that need clipping before the rest of the world outside your house will notice it, too, and wonder if he has a wife.
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. These three things are part of her instructions for living from the multi-part poem “Sometimes”. They are good reminders to preachers and writers that we should get out of our heads and look at the world as it is before we speak of it or write about it.
They are good cues for all of us who live in the world. God tends to speak to us through things rather than going around things and avoiding them in order to get straight to the brain or the heart of people. We don’t live on the world; we live in it. Nature and people are living things, all of them capable of surprising us and astonishing us if we are paying attention.
We won’t ever be astonished by something if we think we already know that thing. Friendships grow stale when one friend knows the other so well, he thinks, that his friend is a hardened conservative or liberal and always must act from that label. Why should he have to speak or think anymore? He’s a category now.
The same is true with adult children and their parents. Will your mother always and only be that woman who nagged you about cleaning up your room when you were 9, or might she be a person who could teach you about listening to your own daughter if you took time now to listen to her? She is not just mother, in other words, she is a woman named Trudy who has a thing to tell you because she herself has paid attention and been astonished by life.
In her poem “In Blackwater Woods”, Oliver has three more things to share after, and only after, she has looked at trees turning their bodies into pillars of light and smelling the fragrance of cinnamon coming from them, and being astonished at the long tapers of cattails on the blue shoulders of the pond.
“To live in this world/ you must be able/ to do three things:/ to love what is mortal;/ to hold it/ against your bones knowing/ your own life depends on it;/ and, when the time comes to let it go,/ to let it go.”
Nature teaches us these things if we are paying attention. God teaches us these things through nature, to be more exact. And when we learn these things, we ought to step back and sigh, rejoicing that we ourselves are alive and can see it all and get just this part of it.
Then we must tell about it, which I am doing now after paying attention to these words and being astonished by them. I have held them close to my bones, because I do think that somehow my life depends upon it. And now I am letting them go to you, and to God, for safekeeping.
Tell someone today about what you have seen and been astonished by.
