“The poem is not the world.
It isn't even the first page of the world.
But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.
It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.”
-excerpt of Flare by Mary Oliver
In honor of this lovely poet, whose imagination and love of nature I’ve always admired, I’d like to acknowledge her on the day she has left her body. It’s easy to say death is so sad, and it is, but it puts time in perspective. Oliver writes:
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility...
Almost everything I’ve read by Mary Oliver has the same ring as many of the traditional yoga scriptures I read regularly: the Bhagavad Gita, The Yoga Sutras of Patajanli, and the Upanishads. Please, don’t tell me justify this link between Mary Oliver and these yogic texts. It is something to be felt, not explained and dissected, so go and read some for yourself and I’d love to hear what you think.
Anyways, Mary Oliver practiced mindfulness before it was the buzzword that it is today. Her poetry is all about paying attention, being present, and living in awe of the extraordinary within the ordinary. That’s why I say she was a woman who did yoga without calling it that. Doesn’t meditation teach us to find the extraordinary in something as simple as the breath? Don’t yoga postures show us our own complexity in something as vital as muscle and bone? To me, her poetry is like a portal into a higher view, that same higher view you can get through practicing yoga postures and meditation.
I know that some yogis these days don’t click with traditional texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads; on the other end of the spectrum, there are yogis who say anyone who doesn’t read those scriptures doesn’t practice true yoga. I’m somewhere in between those schools of thought. For me, those texts hold meaning and power but I know that words are words, subjective, dependent on context, and often tied to culture and social circumstance. That is why I also like to read more modern texts that aren’t translated and that are a little more accessible to readers across different cultures. Oliver’s poetry serves as that kind of text.
So, in honor of Mary Oliver and the coming full moon this weekend, here is one of her poems to end on:
Blossom
In April
the ponds open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there’s fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale - everything else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood - we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered
into the body of another.