I read Mary Oliver for the first time in 11th grade, when my world was rearranging itself and I felt incredibly lost. A teacher assigned The Journey and I remember feeling as though it was a letter to me, telling me others had stood in the exact same place as I — “It was already late / enough, and a wild night / and the road full of fallen / branches and stones” — and to keep going. I copied the poem into my handwritten book of quotes because we didn’t get to keep our school textbooks.
Years later, after I graduated college, a mother whose daughter unexpectedly passed away hours earlier, would recite this poem to me as the two of us drove over dark roads before dawn: “...determined to do / the only thing you could do — / determined to save / the only life you could save.” In those moments I recognized it only as a blurry and faint memory of my own. Later I would google and then dig through my old belongings to find where I had scribbled the poem in high school.
Years later, after law school, when crap-this-isn’t-working coursed through my veins, I started writing again for the first time since that pre-dawn drive through the woods. To see my own words on the screen would send a wave of relief over me: oh, there I am. As soon as I figured out the web basics, I put Mary Oliver’s words from The Summer Day on the very top: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?”
That summer, as I started to listen harder to “a new voice which [I] slowly recognized as my own,” I borrowed New and Selected Poems from the library, and devoured it on the sand by the ocean. I’d read slowly and watch the butterflies float through the sea grass, while I was slowing down, beginning again, like The Moths: “If you notice anything, / it leads you to notice more / and more.”
And then again, a few summers ago, her words found me as I was and gave me what I needed — “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.” — a buoy and a permission slip. A slow exhale and the reminder from St. Augustine: “Things take the time they take. / Don’t / worry.”
A few weeks ago, I received Devotions as a gift. I opened it immediately, before the wrapping paper all fell from the spine, and began to read. Realizing it was not the time nor space to retreat into her words, I put the book away for another day. What joy and sadness I’ll have as I read through her lifetime of words, knowing that while she no longer walks the earth she so revered, her words will always find us on our path and walk forward with us lovingly, gently, and urgently: “To live in this world / you must be able / to do three things: / to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and, when the time comes to let it / go, / to let it go.”
I cherish you, Mary Oliver. 🕊
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