For several years, I have thought about writing a letter to Mary Oliver, my favorite poet, to thank her for enriching my life. I'm sure she has received thousands, being a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, but I felt it would be a symbolic gesture at least, and I would be contented in the fact that I had expressed my gratitude. But I kept putting it off, and what I knew would happen happened today: she passed away, age 83.
So I will try to tell you a little of it, in few words, for one of Mary's great skills was her economy with language.
She taught me how to be vulnerable, how to make allowance for weakness, how to let myself feel.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
She showed me that the sacred is all around us.
You cannot cross one hummock or furrow but it is His holy ground.
Mindfulness? She wrote the book. She wrote dozens.
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
She said, whoever you are, whatever you're doing, be in love.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Peace to you, Mary. You have brought, and helped me to see, such beauty.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
