On January the 17th, I walked out of my 9 am English class to news that Mary Oliver had died that morning from lymphoma. When the friend that I was walking to get a bite to eat with asked me what was wrong, I simply said, “Oh, I just found out that my favorite poet died.” The words stung, not only because I felt them ring true, but because they sounded unimportant in a way that I hated. How did I express what this meant to me without calling Mary Oliver my, “favorite poet?” Yes, she is, but she is so much more. She changed how I viewed the world, my own life, and she drew the circle wide on what it means to be religious. It’s hard to even draw a line between what I believe and what I believe to be true because of Mary Oliver.
In my junior year of high school, I stumbled upon her poetry at a One Act Theater competition in Starkville, MS. I didn’t do theater in high school, but I had joined stage crew at the last minute because a boy that I liked was in the play. It was a bad decision to go, and it became clear that just about every girl had a crush on this same boy, and I felt not special and lonely in the way that being around a bunch of people who have one thing in common that you do not have in common feels like. The college where the competition was held had a book store (thank god) and I quickly escaped to the large college Barnes and Nobles and gladly played the part of a nameless college student looking at books. On my way out, I saw the name Mary Oliver. I had recently been reading Mary Shelley, and I can’t explain why, but the two seemed connected in my mind. I picked up Upstream (what would be her last work before her death) and started to read the essays and prose. I was mesmerized. I quickly bought the book and spent the rest of the weekend reading. No longer was I texting my friends about how bad of a decision it was to come on this trip, but that I had found a poet who was changing my life. I spent the next two years reading all of her works. I would go on to learn about her life– her walks in the woods, her undying love for her partner Molly Malone, and her idea that a prayer is attention. In times of change and tension, I would repeat, “we do one thing or another: we stay the same, or we change. Congratulations, if you have changed.” When I decided to tell someone that I loved them, the words, “There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied… when you hear that unmistakable pounding… then row, row for your life toward it” were the words that compelled me to write the letter, to tell the truth.
How do you say thank you for that? And what do you do when you never actually met someone, but feel so irrevocably connected to them through their words that it is like you have? How do you grieve? These are the questions I have been asking myself this week, and I don’t have answers. But I do know that I can honor Mary’s life by living my, “one wild and precious life” with joyful abandonment, praise, and modesty as she did hers. I can tell someone when I love them, I can, “love myself. Then forget it. Then love the world” and I can be, “still ready, beyond all else, to dance for the world.” I wanted to end this with a poem that will guide how I live my life, for the rest of my life.
“Moments” by Mary Oliver
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled. Like, telling someone you love them. Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it? You’re not in chains, are you?