How to stay amazed in a world that seems bent on destruction
I am of the mind that joy and sadness don't cancel each other out. They are not mutually destructive. One does not replace the other. They can -- and thank goodness, they should -- live together, side-by-side in all of us.
You can be sunken deep down in the the murky depths of your own loss, and still see the light ripple through that darkened water.
You can. I absolutely swear it, you can.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about the poet Mary Oliver, who passed away last Thursday at the age of 83, at her home in Florida. She's an Ohio poet, born in Maple Heights, who went on to win incredible accolades for her poetry, including a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.
One of the things I like most about her work is its accessibility. This was intentional.
According to a Washington Post article about her legacy, she once told NPR: "Poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn't be fancy." Because of that, she was able to reach far more people than a poet concerned only about a poet audience.
What I like even more than that is her willingness to be amazed. How each poem functions as sort of an informal set of directions on how we might find that amazement ourselves. And furthermore: that it doesn't take much -- simply open eyes and an open, curious mind.
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I'm one of those people who turn to literature for instruction or inspiration on how to live a better life. Stories and poems are a panacea -- how do I solve for x? There are books and poems I will re-read when I'm feeling some type of way, sort of a salve for hurt, or a balm for buoyancy when I need to be lifted up. I have always been this way, even as a child: turning to books as an escape, a reminder that the world is bigger than myself and my own ills, that I am nothing if not a mere tiny piece in a grandiose scheme larger than anything I could hope to devise. For me, this was a welcome relief, putting my own feelings into perspective. It was also a blessing to find my own feelings amidst the pages. Books made me feel less alone. Books were friends.
This concept is nothing new. The Paris Review now runs a series called Poetry Rx, where readers can write in with a specific emotion. A "resident poet" will then prescribe a poem to match. Think of it as part advice column, part reading recommendation. It's truly delightful, and accessible -- you get to see that poem in conversation between the letter writer, the poem itself, and the intercessionary poet who functions as a bridge between the two. (Bonus: Kaveh Akbar, one of my favorite living poets, wrote one of the most recent pieces. His book, "Calling a Wolf a Wolf," was one of my favorite books I read in 2018.)
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It's no surprise, then, to say that I felt "found" when I happened upon Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese" -- one of her most famous, one that writer Rachel Syme calls "her poetic equivalent of an arena-rock ballad" in the New Yorker.
It is a gift, I think, the way words can find you when you most need to be found. I felt found in the way that a bird might circle its way back to the wounded, the way I keep circling grief like a dog, the way I keep nursing it like a cat licks its fur. There's something so animal in grief, yet something so familiar in animal, something that makes me feel at once large enough to overcome it, but also small enough to know that it won't kill me.
I discovered "Wild Geese" -- or rather, rediscovered it -- in the days after my brother died. It is a poem that got me through that year and the year after in all of its animal glory: the crawling, the flight, the finding one's place among others despite it all. Every time I read it, I discover something else, and when I do that, I get this feeling of amazement -- in other words, Oliver's commandment comes true again and again, and I start to think, oh, maybe I can do this life thing after all. And even more so: oh, maybe I can do this joy thing after all.
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"Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
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Around Christmas, back at the farm, my parents and I noticed a dead animal at the side of the road just feet from our driveway. My father paused as he went to get the trash can, looked at the carcass, then stood patiently in the wind as he waited for a lone car to pass, whizzing its way down our country road. He walked toward the carcass, the telltale ringed tail a giveaway.
Hours later, we look outside to see something else in the field, moving toward it. I can't tell what it is at first, its wild tufts of white against a dark brown body, but soon I realize it's a bald eagle.
"It's been stopping traffic," my mother says. I see it fling open its wings and refuse to move as a car approaches, then slows. It is defending its food source. Within minutes my father is bundled up in a heavy coat, hat, and leather work gloves. "I'm going to move it off the road," he says. He grabs a shovel off the front porch and walks outside.
After he is done, the carcass is in the field. Once he has returned to the house the eagle returns, picking at his meal, while the three of us stood watching from the living room window.
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This letter is not a blueprint for joy.
It is a reminder that you have a responsibility to joy. To amazement. That work is your work. No one is going to do it for you.
So tell me -- in the words of Mary Oliver -- "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
I'm choosing joy.
xoxo,
ashley
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