When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes away 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?[1]~ Mary Oliver

American poet, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Mary Oliver died today, stepping into that cottage of darkness. She was 83.

I have reached for a familiar, well-worn, dog-eared book on a shelf only feet from my desk. I have referred to it for years simply as “her green book.” Its actual title is New and Selected Poems. I open it to the title page where it is signed “To Dan, from Kev & Cam ~ Christmas ’93.”

My older brother, who is a poet, was way ahead of the curve. So, I was fortunate to be reading Mary Oliver before she became Mary Oliver. Next to Jelaluddin Rumi, whose work became famous through Coleman Barks’ interpretations, Mary Oliver is arguably the second best-known poet in the United States. If Rumi was a poet of “joy and love,” as biographer Brad Gooch says of the Sufi mystic, then Oliver was the poet of wonder and awe.

Her primary subject was nature where she was more at ease than within the confines of human constructions, and more comfortable with the other-than-human world than with the world of human interaction. Shy and socially awkward much of her life, she developed an intimate rapport with the larger earth community. The world of nature was her favorite familiar. What she found there by listening, looking, tasting, touching, and smelling was a sanctuary where she felt safe, and where her human-inflicted wounds were tended and her spirit restored. It was a habitat of honesty and a region of truth where she felt most at home, most herself, and most alive.

The natural world, for Oliver, was even more than a home. It was sacred space that offered her the silence and the music to discover her inherent eloquence, the simple elegance of her own voice which would bless so many others. It was a place of sorrowful, joyful, and glorious mysteries. It was the liturgy of life and she was here to fully participate in “the universe,” which priest and ecotheologian Thomas Berry said, “by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event.” In the enchantment of this beatitudinal festival something was always shining, hatching, diving, dancing, molting, singing, blazing, smoldering, wheeling, crying, unfolding, dying, calling, changing. It was this gorgeous celebratory event that Oliver hoped to announce and to open up for her readers.

Her primary tool was a contemplative eye. Although a keen observer, she was a poet not a scientific researcher, and as such her life was grounded in the profound simplicity of paying attention.

Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.[2]

Whether her attention was on a calf being born, the wings of a moth catching light, the long tapers of cattails, the white fire of the stars, or weeds in a lot, her daily practice was simply and not so simply noticing. She writes:

If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.[3]

She also knew the conscious act and intentional art of noticing enabled her to become a seasoned practitioner of beholding. Never too proud to get on her knees, in fact, inclined to, her disposition, her modus operandi, was more that of a “kneeler in training,” more a grateful guest than a gracious host.[4] In her poem “Ghosts” she writes:

Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
and with the tenderness of any caring woman,
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dream I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.

Her deepest peace, her greatest joy, was to know there was room for her in the grassy inn of the earth, to experience living as a holy communion with all living beings, and to take delight in the honor of being invited into the cosmic dance where all awkwardness is fashioned into beauty by grace. More fully explicated, her daily spiritual practice, her prayerful drawing near to what James Finley calls “the divinity of what just is”[5] was the way of contemplative engagement in which she made a sacrament of stopping, being still, looking, noticing, beholding, being susceptible, being moved, appreciating, being responsive, and acting accordingly.

Mary Oliver was a poet, not a preacher, yet she was a natural apologist for wonder,[6] and the incandescence and incantation of her language reflected the loveliness and the musicality of this world, even as it illuminated its dark secrets. Her message was her life and her life was loving the world. Her gift was the generosity to make room for her readers in the circle of her love song, the ability to weave words to suggest more than words alone can hold, and the desire and capacity to give credence to Thomas Berry’s assertion that the earth, let alone the universe, is a community of subjects to be communed with, not a collection of objects to be exploited. Oliver’s poetry deeply penetrated and resonated with any readers who cared to take the time to ponder both the wildness and preciousness of life.

Like all true poets and all genuine contemplatives, she was an apprentice of voluntary susceptibility who allowed herself to be acted upon, parabled, moved by what caught her eye, her heart, like a small animal in a spider’s web. She mastered the reverent approach, coming upon the intricacies and ecstasies of life as a communicant comes to the Eucharistic table – quietly, humbly, with radical amazement, reverence, gratefulness, rejoicing. She captures this in her poem, “Messenger.”

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.

Mary Oliver was one of those rare people who have the good fortune or the audacity or the courage or the wisdom to make her life’s work her occupation. Her attention was less on making a living than making a life. I have no doubt her readers, equal seekers of sweetness and the beneficiaries of her words, can rest assured that Mary Oliver’s hope expressed in the excerpt below was born out by the fidelity of her life.

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.

Rest in peace, Mary Oliver. We noticed your presence among us. We followed you into the woods with wonder. We walked with you down to Blackwater pond where we emptied our pockets of questions and laid them out in the sun beside yours. We have been anointed with the beauty of your words which have returned us to ourselves and reminded us that “the world is a wedding.”[7] We celebrate your life, particular and real.

NOTES

[1] from “When Death Comes” in New and Selected Poems — Mary Oliver

[2] from “Ghosts” in New and Selected Poems — Mary Oliver

[3] from “Moths” in New and Selected Poems — Mary Oliver

[4] The term “kneeler in training” comes from Etty Hillesum. See Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum (1941-1943)

[5] from The Contemplative Heart, Chapter 2.

[6] See Sam Keen’s book Apology for Wonder

[7] This lovely phrase is from Negative Capability (p. 99) by Nathan Scott, as found in A.M. Allchin’s book The World is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality