June 4: "Self-Portrait," Grace Safaris, My Friend

Mary Oliver is still in love with life . . . 

Self-Portrait

by:  Mary Oliver

I wish I was twenty and in love with life

     and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!

There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side

the roses are blooming and finding their labor

no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs!  There are the roses, and there is the sea

shining like a song, like a body

I want to touch

though I'm not twenty

and won't be again but ah! seventy.  And still

in love with life.  And still

full of beans.

When you read a Mary Oliver poem, you get the feeling that she treated every day like an adventure in grace.  Some people go bird watching.  Others go for long hikes in nature.  I have a friend who thinks nothing of running ten miles just to clear her head.  (If I did that, my adventure would involve a trip to the ER.)  For Mary Oliver, it was hunting for grace daily.  

And by the sounds of it, Oliver didn't ever have to hunt very long.  She could step onto her front porch in the morning to enjoy her coffee, and grace would be circling overhead in the form of an eagle or hawk or heron.  A simple walk through the woods or along a river produced beaver grace and mushroom grace and black bear grace.  After her grace safaris, Oliver would go home and write poems filled with whatever grace had crossed her path that day.

Now, I know it really wasn't that simple.  Even gifted poets go through rough draft after rough draft.  Oliver's poems always seem so effortless to me, but effortlessness takes a lot of effort.  I'd like to believe her poems just sort of arrived upon her, that she just plucked them from a field, pressed them between the pages of the family Bible, and let them dry and turn into something beautiful.

That's not the way writing works.

Perhaps my blog posts seem effortless.  They aren't.  I usually start kicking around ideas early in the morning, sit down with my journal around 10 a.m., and start writing a draft.  I chip away at it all day long until it's time for me to sit down with my laptop.  Often, I've changed ideas quite a few times over the course of the day.

I'm not hunting for grace when I write.  It's nice when grace makes an appearance, but it's a rare occurrence.  For the most part, writing is hard work.  Really hard work.  When I'm in the middle of a poem or essay or blog post, I can become obsessed to the point of complete distraction.  I have stayed up until 3 a.m. working on a draft of a poem, gotten up at 6 a.m. to go to work, worked a full eight or ten hours, and then come home and worked on the poem again for another four or five hours.  If you were counting, I used forms of the word "work" four times in that last sentence.  That's a lot of work.

But I was raised by hardworking parents.  So much of what I do on the weekend doesn't feel relaxing.  For example, I don't really keep holy the Sabbath, if you'll allow me to get a little Old Testament.  God may rest on Sundays, but I've got church services to play music for, and then I need to prepare for another week of work.  Tonight, I had an online poetry workshop to lead.  (If you're still keeping count, "work" appeared three times in this paragraph.)

One of my dad's favorite sayings was, "No rest for the wicked."  I've thought about that phrase quite a bit during my time on this planet.  Does it mean that only wicked people have to work hard?  Or does it mean that wickedness is a fulltime occupation, requiring constant attention?  Maybe it's more metaphysical--once someone wicked dies, that person will never rest in peace ("rest in peace"--another saying that preoccupies me).  

My father used "no rest for the wicked" all the time.  I'd be bitching about stacks of papers I needed to grade, and he'd say it, much to my annoyance.  He'd see me hammering away on my laptop, and he'd say it.  I'd mow my lawn in 90-degree weather, and he'd say it.  Perhaps he was trying to make me feel better, as if those five little words could erase hours of sweat and toil.

This afternoon, I attended a high school graduation party for the daughter of one of my best friends.  It was at a pavilion near the shores of Lake Superior.  The day was gorgeous, temperatures hovering around 90 degrees.  There was a haze of warmth all day long.  (There are wildfires currently raging in Canada, so that may also account for some of the haze.)  

My friend has a lot of things on her plate at the moment.  She's working.  Her son just graduated from the University of Michigan at the beginning of May.  Her daughter graduated from high school a couple days ago.  In a week's time, she and her family are flying to France for a family vacation.  And her father has been struggling with his health.  (Here's where my dad would have said, "No rest for the wicked.")

My friend is a grace-seeker.  Usually, we get together once a week, early in the morning, to write.  These writing sessions, for me, are grace safaris.  They give me a little time to reflect and discover Mary Oliver moments in my life.  My friend can identify flowers and trees.  She can listen to birdsong and tell me whether I'm hearing a white-throated sparrow or a hermit thrush.  Like Oliver, my friend finds her solace in the natural world.

It was good to spend time with my friend this afternoon.  She grounds me when I'm ready to climb to the roof of the library and throw myself off of it.  I hope I do the same for her.  We are both people who have a hard time saying "no."  That means that both are lives become a little . . . frantic at times.

My friend was my grace today.

Now, my wife is asking me to take our puppy out for a walk around the backyard.

Cue Saint Marty's dad:  "No rest for the wicked."