Wise words from Mary Oliver

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). 

Feeling useful

It’s been a while since I’ve done as much physical work as I did today and during the past two weeks. Our dining room renovations are finished for the most part (there are still some small jobs to do), so much of the physical work today involved hours of cleaning and vacuuming—floors, walls, furniture, books—anywhere where the fine white sand and dust from all the sanding and construction work had settled. As far as I can see, it seems to have settled everywhere! But today was amazingly effective, as was this past week. I have to emphasize that the efficiency is at home, not at work. That’s because I can plan the work at home as I like, no one is standing over me assessing my productivity and efficiency except me. I’m my own slave driver. I don’t need others to do that job. But the wonderful efficiency I experience at home is in stark contrast to the inefficiency I experience at present on a daily basis at work. How is it possible, is what I’m always asking myself? I’m still waiting for my budget problems to be corrected (going on two years now); I informed my superiors that my budgets were incorrect and they sent the message further and the mistake is still not corrected. I am having problems with one email account and don’t know who to talk to about having it fixed. I need to order supplies but the person who normally does that is on sick leave and has been for a while. The other day I went to make a telephone call out of Norway (work-related) and was interrupted by the operator who promptly told me that I needed permission from the accounting department and my superiors to make international calls. This was new to me and since I’m not sure who to talk to, it’s easier not to make any calls. The hospital is apparently in dire straits these days—no money---so they’re adopting desperate measures to reduce spending. All hiring has been stopped. It will be interesting though to see if the hospital will continue to hire administrators. It seems we cannot have too many of them and we cannot live without them. Here’s a joke (of my own creation)—how many administrators does it take to order, purchase and screw in a light bulb? At least six if not more—one has to look at the work order, another has to approve it, another has to order the bulb, another has to send the invoice to the accounting department, another has to pay the bill, and another has to file the paid invoice. And of course I forgot—the delivery department also has to get involved in order to deliver the bulb, and then someone has to install it.

I really enjoyed working hard and efficiently today. I felt useful—to my home, to myself, to my marriage, to my life and to my future. That is what I thrive on—feeling useful, feeling that the work I do is useful. Seeing the results, seeing the clean and organized home, seeing the finished renovations, the painted walls, the sanded and lacquered floors. 

I could start a consulting business to organize people’s homes. I think I would be good at it. I like the work—sorting through papers and files, categorizing things, seeing the neat results (literally). Hours pass in this way and it’s pleasant, at least to me. I know that a lot of people hate to clean and organize. But we grew up with the Catholic philosophy—“cleanliness is next to godliness”—it was talked about in school. Makes sense to me. It doesn’t mean that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder or that I have to clean on a daily basis. It’s enough to get the major stuff done and out of the way, and that can be a couple of times a year at most if it involves sorting and organizing. Getting things accomplished in this way clears the mental path for other projects on the waiting list. I hate procrastination above most things, and I knew too many procrastinators in my earlier years. It’s just to ignore them and keep on. I hope my work life goes back to being efficient. It was so efficient and streamlined for many years; then came the mergers and the efficiency and productivity got shot to hell. I hope the tide turns and we go back to a daily work life that makes sense and that makes me feel useful again.