Tag: Mary Oliver

Why we should take ourselves lightly

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We often think that the way forward lies in us putting a lot of work  into our life, hoping to improve and fix what we do not like. And we can bring that attitude to meditation also, seeing it as something I am doing, and something I have got to do. However, just as one of the big problems in meditation is that we can take ourselves too seriously, we also need to realize that a big step towards contentment lies in letting some things go or not holding on too tightly to the succession of energies that appear in the mind, both positive “improving” ones as well as the ones that are arise from difficult events or people.  Now to say this sounds quite simple. But the tendency of the mind is to hold onto most things and make them into problems. We don’t have the faith or the trust or the willingness to just totally let go in the moment, to allow things pass through lightly, rather than amplifying them and making them into a story about our value or our life. Where meditation helps is in coming to see that the mind is continually generating stories and fears, and that holding one to every one can become quite tiring. Letting go our our inflated sense of the importance of our dramas can be liberating.  The image in this poem may help  –  as a way of dealing with thoughts in meditation, as a way of dealing with our preoccupation with “me” and “I”, as a way of dealing with our tendency to improve and fix and fret.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.

Mary Oliver, One or Two Things

Noticing colour in grey days

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Some similar thoughts, this time from a poet and not a neuroscientist. She encourages us to notice the little moments of colour that come into every day as a way of going against the heart’s tendency to close in on itself:

Red bird came all winter firing up the landscape as nothing else could.
Of course I love the sparrows, those dun-colored darlings so hungry and so many.
I am a God-fearing feeder of birds.
I know He has many children,
not all of them bold in spirit.
Still, for whatever reason —
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,
or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens —
I am glad
that red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Mary Oliver, Red Bird

Empty branches

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To have loved is everything,
I loved, once, a hummingbird who came every afternoon– the freedom-loving male–

who flew by himself to sample the sweets of the garden, to sit on a high, leafless branch with his red throat gleaming.

And then, he came no more.
And I’m still waiting for him, ten years later,

to come back, and he will, or he will not.
There is a certain commitment that each of us is given,
that has to do with another world,

if there is one.
I remember you, hummingbird.
I think of you every day even as I am still here,
soaked in color, waiting year after honey-rich year.

Mary Oliver, An Empty Branch in the Orchard

Living the moments in front of us

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I am thinking, or trying to think, about all the imponderables for which we have
no answers, yet endless interest all the range of our lives,

and it’s good for the head no doubt
to undertake such meditation; Mystery, after all, is God’s other name, and deserves our  considerations surely.

But, but – excuse me now, please;
it’s morning, heavenly bright,
and my irrepressible heart begs me to hurry on into the next exquisite moment.

Mary Oliver, Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn

Every morning a new day is created

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A simple poem, suggested by the sky at dawn this morning. Even as the days shorten, and darkness seems to encroach more, the light at dawn is beautiful. There are moments of light and strength, even at those times when we seem to struggle.

Every morning the world is created…

If it is in your nature to be happy..

And if your spirit  carries within it

the thorn that is heavier than lead….

there is still somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted –

each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly, every morning,

whether or not you have ever dared to be happy,

whether or not you have ever dared to pray.

Mary Oliver

Accepting whatever comes next….

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Now are the rough things smooth, and the smooth things stand in flickering slats, facing the slow tarnish of sun-fall.

Summer is over, or nearly.

And therefore the green is not green anymore but yellow, beige, russet, rust; all the darknesses are beginning to settle in.

And therefore why pray to permanence, why not pray to impermanence, to change, to – whatever comes next.

Willingness is next to godliness.

Mary Oliver, prose-poem