One or Two Things: Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver so often provides what I need, when I need it--whether I'm looking for it or not, whether I know I need it or not. It's so easy to relate to her most insightful, transcendent or uplifting reflections on life as she looks deeply at the simplist, most common earthly things and events. But now and then she surprises with that sober reflection, that recurrent lesson of reality, that causes us to stop and just feel it, often uncomfortably, then look for something more comforting or transcendent. Reading through Dreamworks (1986) again, I was struck that way by parts of one poem I'd read a few times before:


One or Two Things

1
Don't bother me.
I've just
been born...

3

The god of [earth]

came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things, I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice,

crow voice,
frog voice;

now, he said,

and now,

and never once mentioned forever,

4

which has nevertheless always been,

like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind...

7

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.


Just the instinctive reflection of her spiritual intuition? Perhaps. Or, perhaps her own translation and experience of the Zen, Sufi or Christian contemplatives? But isn't it also possible to see a foreshadowing of her future life-and-loss lessons, her spiritual rebirth, her own deeper, personal experiences and understandings to come?