Mary Oliver.
Fuck, I miss her.
This is such a brilliant line. I read a book of her poems every morning, religiously. It frames my day for me. It sets me out and gives me a differing perspective on life and living than I typically wake up with everyday.
She was so quirky, poignant and irreverent. So unbreakable, and yet so tender. I never met her but I imagine her to have been sinewy and gruff, followed always by crystalline intimacy that one never quite got over. This is how she lands in me, anyway.
And oh, her wisdom. The one, two combo punch of apt descriptors and the heady, lofty concepts that underscored everything she wrote. So much fucking wisdom.
Her experience is our experience. And she had such a way to help us see things we knew but didn’t notice. And was so wisely able to summarize life tasks and challenges in one liners or stanza of prose.
I fucking love her.
This one line of her poem “Evidence” is relevant to me right now because I feel like I just moved through a threshold of stalled. I was functional for a long time but I was not really living. And it was a very old pain that had me stalled and looped for decades. She is right there are many ways to perish or flourish. And it seems that so many people lose their way, because of these old pains. We arrive at some threshold that we don’t even know is a hold on our lives and living, until we are capable of finally breaking through to the other side.
She ends this stanza of the poem (reproduced below) with a reminder of how much other things in this life persist and grow, and change and survive and love and live and overcome despite the unending obstacles life provides. Unending obstacles, that is life after all. One after another, each one with varying degrees of complexity and pain. But in this whole endeavor we call living, we do have a choice to allow the anxiety, pain and hardship to stall us out, or use those very same things as further motivation for hard work and growth.
With each moment of every day we are making choices to move closer to perishing or flourishing. And our old pains, long ago etched upon our bodies, minds and souls, threaten our forward progress, our enjoyment of this whole living endeavor. We move through this life at a level of function, or perhaps dysfunction, and we call that living.
You can allow all that has happened to be your undoing, or you can steel yourself to that beckoning and decide instead to use all that has happened to you, as something that while it happened to you, also happened for you. And this sole fact alone, this one decision made, can change everything, all at once, forever.
Again...still.
Excerpt from “Evidence “- Mary Oliver
There are many ways to perish, or to flourish.
How old pain, for example, can stall us at the threshold of function….
Still friends, consider stone, that is without the fret of gravity, and water that is without anxiety.
And the pine trees that never forget their recipe for renewal.
And the female wood duck who is looking this way and that way for her children. And the snapping turtle who is looking this way and that way also. This is the world.
And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.
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