Being Awake in the World
It is so hard to be awake. I don’t mean when the alarm goes off, or you’re summoned to dinner, or it’s time to collect your paycheck.
I mean really awake, every moment of every day. Awake so you feel the exquisite birth, life, and death of each delicious second. Yes, every one. I mean it just like that, especially like that.
Of course it’s impossible. The laundry intrudes, the phone, the dog, the child or troubled friend. Everyone and every thing seems to have an issue, and that’s true in the moment, in any moment.
But equally true is the ability to transcend distraction, to declare in any given moment, “I am free of the chattering mind, the unbalancing disturbances!”
In this poem, Mary Oliver speaks to just such a moment, its opportunity beckoning on any given day.
Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
See how playful she is with us through that fifth line—“kills me”—which makes me expect something sad and horrible. Isn’t it so? And am I not thrilled when, in the next line, I hear or read that it “kills me/with delight”? You bet! In fact, I’m laughing, enjoying the sort of deep laughter therapy that only certain kinds of poems can deliver. This is one.
Oliver isn’t finished. No funny-one-note she! The next four lines offer a timeless cliché. Believe me, budding critics and poets in literature and M.F.A. programs everywhere blanche at this sort of thing, but thousands of readers connect with it because they understand the sadness and sweetness of unoriginal thought, which everyone shares, and all of our efforts to turn such thoughts into something else.
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
And then the declaration of a free and joyful woman:
It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
Ah, to be born to look, to listen, to lose oneself in a soft world that teaches “over and over/in joy,/and acclimation” and to do so through the ordinary, through prayers made out of grass.
That’s an awareness to aim one’s practice at, and I’m doing just that.
I think I’ve read almost everything Mary Oliver has written, including her new book “Our World”. She comes at the world with eyes so open, so wanting and willing to absorb what’s offered or just there. She seems to feel what’s just there. She doesn’t have to search, to ask; she knows and accepts.
Hi, Maureen,
You say this beautifully, and I couldn’t agree more. She seems wide open to the world as it is. She is not confused or misled by false appearances. Acceptance, that’s important in her vision, in her work.
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