Tag Archives: Mary Oliver

Backyard

1 Reply

I am still slowly dealing with debris from long-ago storms Fiona and Dorian. Most of the downed trees, hundreds of them on the 23 acres we occupy, will never be “cleaned up”. It’s too big of a job for me, the tangle of toppled 60-year-old spruce trees impenetrable in many places. I did a walk a couple of hundred feet from our house the other day and had to haul myself over trees piled four or five feet high, a brief panic of wondering if I was suddenly too old for such exertions followed by the relief that I am still quite physically strong.

Visitors comment on the destruction, on the fire hazard I’m allowing to remain. Yes, it’s true, it is all a fire hazard, but living in a forest full of conifers is a fire hazard anyway, dead or alive, so I’m used to it, and as a full-time caregiver I can’t do much more about it than I have. There are endless opportunities to worry about risks real and imagined, as I was reminded of at an emergency measures training I took many years ago.

We were to list what possible disasters could befall our municipalities, and we ticked off all types of natural disasters and possible human-caused chaos. The instructor, knowing exactly where my house is, said, “What about you, Thelma, what’s overhead all the time where you live?” Fuel-filled jets heading from North America to Europe, that’s what, and they could crash in Portage, he said, causing the western end of PEI to be cut off and straining the resources of our local emergency crews to deal with a disaster of such magnitude. Wide-eyed, we nervously laughed at this, thinking it so unlikely, but internally my younger self, who listened to the planes flying overhead on summer nights in our uninsulated cottage, wondering if some of them might be Russian missiles headed to the US, didn’t think it so far-fetched.

So I pick away at the fire hazard in the forest, my only real goal to reestablish walking paths that were there before Dorian in 2019 or, more likely, make new paths where an easier way through is evident. There is a lot to be said for taking the easy way, especially in nature. Nature just wants us to leave it alone to do its thing, to recognize that constantly trying to bend and shape it to our needs is futile and counterproductive. When you get comfortable with the mess of nature, less anxious to constantly clean everything up, the mess of life becomes more bearable. My Mary Oliver poem this morning certainly agrees:

BACKYARD
I had not time to haul out all
the dead stuff so it hung, limp
or dry, wherever the wind swung it

over or down or across. All summer
it stayed that way, untrimmed, and
thickened. The paths grew
damp and uncomfortable and mossy until
nobody could get through but a mouse or a

shadow. Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter
totally without direction management
supervision. The birds loved it.

Mary Oliver 
from Owls and Other Fantasies, 2003

Of The Empire

I’m late to my (mostly) daily readings today. As well as my own book of collected quotes and poems (which I now know is called a commonplace book), my small stack of books at present are:

  • More Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations, edited by Josh Bartok
  • How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, Translated with a commentary by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood
  • The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
  • Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

I have a couple of Mary Oliver books I rotate in and out of my stack. I simply go through the book from one poem to the next, so today’s selection surprised me, reflecting how I’m feeling as I try to ignore the news from the country to the south, a place I don’t understand, and whose leaders I now somewhat fear.

OF THE EMPIRE

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Mary Oliver
from the book Red Bird, 2008, Beacon Press