Note # 37 – Pay Attention. Be Astonished.

I am not ashamed to say that I wept a little today when I read that the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver had died of lymphoma at 83. I’d never met her, but like all great poets and writers, she made me feel like I knew her – like we went for long walks in the woods together as friends, remarking on the birdsong and telling each other our hearts’ deepest longings.

It’s hard to describe what her poetry meant to me. I remember the very first time I read one of her poems – it was like when I was twelve years old and I put on my much-needed glasses for the first time. I’d had no idea until that moment that there was such beauty in the world until the thick lenses of my glasses snapped it all into focus. Her poetry was like that. She painted magnificent pictures of the natural world and our souls, she sculpted miraculous moments out of exquisite words and then she displayed these tiny pieces of art for us to look at and admire and learn from.

In a way, my novel, The Kitchen Sink Sutra is little more than twenty chapters about a woman making a choice of what to do with her “one wild and precious life.” In an early draft I actually had one character say almost those exact words to Olivia, but later edited them out because I felt like a pale imitator of a great master.

One of my favourite passages of hers is from Sometimes:

“Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

That’s what I try to do every day. It’s why I write these blog posts and why I wrote The Kitchen Sink Sutra and why I will write stories and novels and reflections and poetry every day for as long as I am able to hold a pen. I am completely astonished and I’m just trying to tell about it.

Someone once asked her why she wrote poetry. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “What else are we going to do?”

What else, indeed.

P.

P.S. Make your life your poetry.