Sometimes we need a few simple words to awaken our spirits to all that surrounds us. We need to stop over thinking and tend to the ordinary and mundane.

A Thousand Mornings (2012) by Mary Oliver is a slim book of poetry that covers a lifetime of daily experience. Oliver, who writes in a style that has been described as a “pathway of invitation,” returns to the land around her Provincetown, Massachusetts home—the marshland and coastline—to observe and be amazed by the everyday. As her publisher notes, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.

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I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall-
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

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THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER

As long as you’re dancing, you can
break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.

Sometimes there are no rules.

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WAS IT NECESSARY TO DO IT?  

I tell you that ant is very alive!

Look at how he fusses at being stepped on” 

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Every single day we should all be asking ourselves Mary Oliver’s simple question which ends one of her most famous poems from the collection New and Selected Poems 1992:

THE SUMMER DAY

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Nick Wilson on Unsplash