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As fall begins to drift in, I’m called back to these lines in Mary
Oliver’s poem, “The
Summer Day”:
“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 down 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?”
Perhaps the greatest joy of poetry is how you’re able to hold its
wisdom in your palm, keep it in your back pocket, turn it over in your
head. The final question of this poem — “Tell me, what is it you plan
to do / with your one wild and precious life?” — crosses my mind as I
sleep and wake and wander, brushing my teeth or when I realize that
the magnolia tree looming over me has been growing quietly this whole
time.
In this way, poetry is both a companion and a gift, as Mary
Oliver told Krista in a 2015 interview that we’re
revisiting this week. “It’s a gift to yourself but it’s a gift to
anybody who has a hunger for it,” she said. The thought echoes
something philosopher Simone
Weil once said — that “attention is the rarest and purest
form of generosity.”
At a moment when the world can feel strange and difficult — or, at
the very least, monotonous — Oliver’s poem draws our attention back to
how our earthly existence may be just enough to get us through. She
found inspiration in the works of the Roman poet Lucretius, whose
Epicurean philosophy she sums up as: “What we are made of will make
something else.”
“There is no nothingness — with these little atoms that run around
too little for us to see. But, put together, they make something,” she
said. “And that to me is a miracle. Where it came from, I don’t know.
But it’s a miracle, and I think it’s enough to keep a person
afloat.”
If we understand existence as a miracle, then maybe the generosity
that Simone Weil speaks of is not what we extend to others, but
instead what the world offers us — if only we’re lucky enough to look
up and around in awe.
Yours, Kristin Lin Editor, The On Being Project
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This
Week at The On Being Project
Our Latest Episode

On Being with Krista
Tippett Mary
Oliver “Listening
to the World”
Finding nourishment and redemption in the natural world, with
one of the most beloved poets.
Listen on: Apple
Podcasts Google
Podcasts Spotify Our
Website
Recommended Reading & Listening

Listen | “Wild
Geese” by Mary Oliver The late
poet reads one of her most beloved poems.
Listen | “Tending
Joy and Practicing Delight” with Ross
Gay A conversation with the poet (and community gardener)
on the practice of cultivating the beauty inherent in our
surroundings.
Read | “Mary
Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her
Soul Mate” by Maria Popova | Brain
Pickings The writer expands on a quote that Krista
references in her conversation with Mary Oliver — that “attention
without feeling … is only a report.”
Find more in our onbeing.org library on Poets
& Poetry.
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