May 16: "To Begin With, The Sweet Grass," Love Ourselves, Love the World

Some life lessons from Mary Oliver . . .

To Begin With,

The Sweet Grass

by:  Mary Oliver

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat

     of the sweet grass?

Will the owl bite off its own wings?

Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or

     forget to sing?

Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say--behold

the reliability and the finery and the teachings

     of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

     are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are

     thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

3.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.

It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It's more than the beating of the single heart.

It's praising.

It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life--just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe

     still another.

4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,

the dancer, the potter, 

to make me a begging bowl

which I believe 

my soul needs.

And if I come to you,

to the door of your comfortable house

with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,

will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.

I would like to give you this chance.

5.

We do one thing or another, we stay the same, or we

     change.

Congratulations, if

     you have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.

Do you also think that beauty exists for some

     fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure--

     your life--

what would do for you?

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.

Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.

That was many years ago.

Since then I have gone out from my confinements,

     though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.

I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.

They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment

     somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.

I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.

I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,

I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?

Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

This is all that Mary Oliver knows, boiled down, condensed, and concentrated:  first, learn to love yourself; second, forget that love; third, learn to love the world.

That's it.

As children, we learn fairly early to love ourselves.  The universe is all about our needs--our pains and hungers and joys and sorrows.  We are gravity and sun.  That's the way things work for the first few years of our lives.

The rest of our time is spent unlearning this narcissism.  Unfortunately, some people never do.  Those individuals become serial killers, owners of Facebook and Twitter, or Presidents of the United States who start insurrections.

Loving the world is a harder lesson to learn.  Because it means placing other needs ahead of our own--climate, world hunger, refugees, poverty, intolerance, to name a few.  I could go on, but I think you get the idea.  It's a difficult transition to make because it is a paradigm shift, from child to adult, immaturity to maturity.  

I've been teaching college undergraduates for almost 30 years.  I've read more college composition papers than I care to count.  Most of the time, those essays reflect a developing understanding of the world.  There are dead grandmother essays, where the writer is coming to terms with mortality.  There are breakup essays, where the writer is grappling with cruelty and rejection.  There are loss of faith essays, where the writer rails against organized religion.  Then there are nature essays and homeless essays and abuse essays, where the writer starts putting these global issues into the context of their lives.

It takes some time to reach that Mary Oliver stage in life--when the world's needs replace the need for the newest iPhone iteration.  That kind of enlightenment is a lifelong process.  There is a Zen proverb that says, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."  We are all going to be chopping wood and carrying water until the day we shuffle off this mortal coil.  

Every day, I try to chop the wood and carry the water.  By taking care of the needs of the world (and the people in it), I'm taking care of myself, as well.  Enlightenment is like moving into a new house.  There isn't just one big lightbulb to be switched on.  It's more like a series of lights.  You move from room to room, turning on lights, discovering each new space.

I'm old enough to have flipped on a lot of light switches in my life.  Yet, I'm still learning things, about myself and my place in the world.  Each blade of sweet grass or incoming tide or piece of bread is an opportunity to become a child of the clouds and of hope, as Oliver says.

As he gets older and possibly wiser, Saint Marty gets younger and younger, in attitude and outlook.

July 1: Full of Blood and Smoke, Wars, Bigfoot Outlook

Merton gets drawn into war . . . 

That winter, when I was talking about the England of Langland and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Webster, the war-machine of totalitarian Germany had turned to devour that island, and morning after morning when I glanced at The New York Times in the library, between classes, I read the headlines about the cities that had been cut to pieces with bombs. Night after night the huge dark mass of London was bursting into wide areas of flame that turned its buildings into empty craters and cariated those miles and miles of slums. Around St. Paul’s the ancient City was devastated, and there was no acre of Westminster, Bloomsbury, Camden Town, Mayfair, Bayswater, Paddington that had not been deeply scarred. Coventry was razed to the ground. Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle were all raided, and the land was full of blood and smoke. 

The noise of that fearful chastisement, the fruit of modern civilization, penetrated to the ears and minds of very few at St. Bonaventure’s. The Friars understood something of what was going on: but they lost themselves, for the most part, in futile political arguments if they talked about it at all. But the students were more concerned with the movies and beer and the mousy little girls that ran around Olean in ankle socks, even when the snow lay deep on the ground. 

I think it was in November that we all lined up, students and secular professors, in De la Roche Hall and gave our names in to be drafted. The whole process was an extremely quiet and unmomentous one. The room was not even crowded. You didn’t even have the boredom of waiting. I gave my name and my age and all the rest, and got a small white card. It was quickly over. It did not bring the war very close. 

Yet it was enough to remind me that I was not going to enjoy this pleasant and safe and stable life forever. Indeed, perhaps now that I had just begun to taste my security, it would be taken away again, and I would be cast back into the midst of violence and uncertainty and blasphemy and the play of anger and hatred and all passion, worse than ever before. It would be the wages of my own twenty-five years: this war was what I had earned for myself and the world. I could hardly complain that I was being drawn into it.

Like Merton, we all get drawn into wars that are sometimes of our own making, sometimes not.  When I was younger, I believed that, as you aged, life would get easier.  You'd fall into a career.  Into love.  Into family.  Fall into a kind of existence where every day is, at worst, normal and quiet, and, at best, a little new and exciting.  I didn't aspire to be Ernest Hemingway or a contestant on Survivor.  I preferred guided tours versus build-your-own-adventures.

Yet, despite my best efforts, wars happened and continue to happen.  I can be a little free and loose with my opinions around friends and family.  That has caused a few minor police actions.  And a few people in my life have nuclear capabilities that have led to one or two Cuban Missile Crises and a few Hiroshimas, as well.  It is impossible, in this broken world, to avoid being wounded in combat.

Of course, my personal turmoils pale in comparison to the experiences of women and men who have gone into actual armed conflict.  I know that.  The war analogies I'm using here are my way of addressing huge issues that I have dealt with/am dealing with.  I don't want to lay myself bare.  I'm not Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell.  I'm more Emily Dickinson:  "Tell all the truth but tell it slant--"

So, my slant truth is that I am in the trenches.  Have been for a few years now.  Only a handful of people know the whole story, because, believe it or not, I'm a fairly private individual.  In my poetry, I've let Bigfoot do the talking for me.  For four or five years, he's been my surrogate, dealing with the slings and arrows.  He's bigger and stronger than me.  Can carry the world on his broad shoulders a lot longer than I can.

More people need Bigfoot in their lives.  Or more people need to be Bigfoot.  I may sound crazy right now, but that's okay.  I'm speaking my Bigfoot truth.  You see, wars are senseless things, usually started by people who have lost sight of what it means to be a part of humanity.  It's very easy to hurt a person if all you are focused on is yourself.  Your own pleasures and wants.  That's called narcissism, and it will eventually lead to abandonment, isolation, depression, mental illness.  And war.

I prefer a Bigfoot outlook.  Where you don't use the world solely for your own selfish needs.  Where love isn't a finite resource, that shifts and changes and disappears.  Where the song of spring peepers can thaw a frozen heart.  Where everyone has a cave filled with pine bough beds and piles of sweet apples.  Where giants stand hidden in the forest verge, keeping guard against greed and hunger and sorrow.  Where footprints are deep and wide and full of mud.  Where forever is forever, with shoulders that span the universe.

Perhaps the reason Bigfoot remains myth is pretty simple:  human beings are too human.  We embrace all the things that hurt and destroy.  We declare war on each other and the world.  Until all that changes, Bigfoot is never going to come out of the woods.  Will remain a mystery.

And that's Saint Marty's slant Bigfoot truth.

A Good Hominid Is Hard to Find

by:  Martin Achatz

Flannery wasn't into beauty:

dolls and doilies and needlepoint.

Gravity pulled her to Bantams

that strutted backwards.  Carnivals

where intersexed people spouted

Gospel.  Eucharist suns that bled

across Georgia dusk.  And Bigfoot.

She loved him sacramentally, 

as if her salvation depended on it.

When she couldn't walk any more,

he carried her around Andalusia,

so she could hear stupid cows

bellow, see peafowl blossom

into resurrection.  When she sat

at her Remington, he stood outside

her bedroom window, listened 

to her machine gun fingers

as they hunted misfits moving

through pine branches like noon

grace.  She thought Bigfoot

was a holy ghost, a hairy pentecost

in her feebled life.  In the hospital,

when she died, perhaps she saw

him enter her room, scoop her up,

cradle her against his thick breast,

carry her down a highway where 

insects sawed the heavens in two.