Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets. She was fully connected to the nature around her and was from a very young age. When I read her words, they pierce my mind and heart with their clarity and wisdom. We don't have time to waste in our lives, and yet so many of us do. We waste time on social media, we waste time watching one tv show after another. There is nothing inherently wrong with either social media or tv. It's when we devote hours of our day to them when we could be doing something else, something that might bring us closer to the people around us or to the spiritual or to the natural world. She writes about getting started on belonging to the world, but for her, that world was mostly the natural world. I am also so inclined. There is so much to discover in the natural world, and I've written a lot about that since I became the caretaker of an allotment garden in 2016. I know that one cannot live life as a hermit or hide oneself away, but we have to respect the individual choices that people make about how to live their lives. We cannot force introverts to be extroverts, or extroverts to be introverts. We cannot force those who love urban living to love rural living, and vice versa. And so on. We are where we are for a reason, and we can make the most of each day that is given us in that environment, no matter how difficult. We each have to find our own way of belonging to the world and use our god-given talents to join the world. That will be a different road for each person. The important thing is that one contributes to the world in his or her own unique way.
Mary Oliver writes:
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
~Mary Oliver
(from her book: Blue Horses)
(She mentions John Keats (1795-1821), who was an English Romantic poet who died of tuberculosis when he was only twenty-five years old. A reminder that we don't always know if we have a lifetime or not to achieve our dreams and visions. As I am fond of saying--If not now, when? There is no time like the present to start doing. As the Nike ad says--Just do it).
