Poetry: "A Doorway into Thanks"

 Tim Woodcock writes: With National Poetry Month coming to an end, it’s time to share a poem by Mary Oliver that I had put aside and earmarked a few weeks back. Coincidentally, with Earth Day Sunday in mind, Mike Willock, had also sent me a reflection by Oliver about her relationship to nature, which I will incorporate into the second half of this blog post.

I came across Mary Oliver's poem "Praying" a couple of months ago on a Monday morning. Why do know it was a Monday morning? Because at the school where I work there is a tradition, which dates back about 15 years, of beginning Monday's assemblies with a “poem of the week.” Usually the poem is one selected and read by a teacher, but sometimes it’s by a student; it is also a platform for students to share their own poems, if they have won awarded in local contests, which happens with some frequency. It’s lovely moment of settling in and refocusing as the school week begins. Even during the COVID-inflected turbulence of the past couple of years, “poem of the week” has stayed a constant thread in school life, while assemblies have moved from the theater (where space is tight) to the gym (where space is plentiful), and in the early days of the lockdown, it took a new form with readers recording videos to share online.

Anyway, this Mary Oliver poem stands squarely on its own two feet and has no need of an introduction.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Oliver is perhaps the pre-eminent contemporary poet of everyday spirituality. Oliver died in 2019 and with no shortage of awards and plaudits. Yet I keep seeing and hearing references to her work across so many different contexts (high-brow, low-brow, secular, and spiritual) that convince me that she is someone whose reputation will keep growing for years to come.

I’m grateful to Mike Willock for circulating me this excerpt from an essay that expands on the sentiments of the poem and that sheds some light on Oliver method as a poet primarily concerned with nature. The part that especially stirred Mike is in bold. 

Excerpt from Upstream, selected essays by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press (2016):

When I came to a teachable age, I was, as most youngsters are, directed toward the acquisition of knowledge, meaning not so much ideas but demonstrated facts. Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state. I am not talking about having faith necessarily, although one hopes to. What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude. Such interest nourishes me beyond the finest compendium of facts. In my mind now, in any comparison of demonstrated truths and unproven but vivid intuitions, the truths lose.

I would therefore write a kind of elemental poetry that doesn’t just avoid indoors but doesn’t even see the doors that lead inward – to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf. I would talk about the owl and the thunderworm and the daffodil and the red-spotted newt as a company of spirits, as well as bodies. I would say that the fox stepping out over the snow has nerves as fine as mine, and a better courage. I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves – we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.

I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not be. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.