Sometimes
by: Mary Oliver
1.
Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn't an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.
Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don't know what God is.
I don't know what death is.
But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.
2.
Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless.
3.
Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the heat of midsummer.
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
drowse of creation,
when it began to break.
In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.
In an hour they sky was filled
with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.
Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!
The lightning brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone it its body.
4.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
You left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.
6.
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again--
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably--
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.
7.
Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.
After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened
to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.
I think this poem is one of the few by Oliver I've encountered where she admits to breathless melancholy. She doesn't often speak of that kind of darkness. Of course, she experienced sorrow and grief. She was human, making her way through a broken world.
Even people who seem very in-touch with their spiritual sides aren't immune to sadness or doubt or fear. Like everyone else, these emotions are often mixed up with wonder or joy or or awe. For me, every day is a grab bag of feelings. I may wake up tired and sad, move on to excited after breakfast, transition to bored or anxious post lunch, and end up stunned or confused by bedtime.
I'm like Oliver, standing on the shore of a pond, seeing something I can't quite identify emerge from and glide along the surface of the water. Not a cat. Not a lillypad. It's a part of creation completely new to me, yet also as familiar as the scar on my pinky.
At church tonight, we celebrated the ninetieth birthday of a longtime parishioner. She was in attendance with her extended family. At the end of the Mass, the priest raised his arms and blessed her. After Mass, she lingered at the front of the sanctuary, posing for pictures and basking in the love and attention.
This woman was born in 1933. Adolf Hitler was just coming into power. FDR was sworn in for his first term as President of the United States. It was the height of the Great Depression, with the unemployment rate hovering around 25 percent. That means one in four people didn't have jobs. The original King Kong was the number one movie. Prohibition was repealed.
In her 90 years, she's experienced several wars, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, many genocides and famines, a worldwide energy crisis, race riots, global warming, and a deadly pandemic. She's also witnessed humans walking on the surface of the moon, the rise of the Internet, Star Wars and Harry Potter, and the first African American to serve in the Oval Office.
All lifetimes are filled with these kinds of tragedies and miracles. Creation and apocalypse. Sometimes, we don't even know how to describe or name these things. Atom bomb. Holocaust. Apollo 11. Google. iPhone. AIDS. Artificial intelligence. They're all catheads in the dark dinner-bowl of the pond.
Mary Oliver's three rules for living a lifetime are pretty simple and profound:
1. Pay attention.
2. Be astonished.
3. Tell about it.
Something astounding happens every day. Small and large wonders.
The lilacs in my backyard just started blooming. I am surrounded by their scent. Two days ago, they were just ideas, tiny little green fists waiting to beat the air up with beauty. Tonight, my little portion of the world is drunk with purple.
Saint Marty paid attention. He's astonished. Now, he's telling you about it.
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