August 22, 2019
My Work is Loving the World
Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird –
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all 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.
This is the first poem in Mary Oliver‘s collection Thirst, titled, “The Messenger.
I encountered it at a writing workshop for houseless vendors at StreetRoots this week. Mary Oliver had been previously introduced to me by the workshop leader who continually excels in expanding my horizons and I took to this poem in no time. Hey, gratitude for nature! Up my alley. Loving the world? A familiar task. Mouth shouting joy – my readers are my witness!
And then a participant pointed out, with anguish bordering on rage, that it was not their job to love the world. A world that mistreated them, rejected them, punished them, tortured them, deprived them and excluded them. A world where safety was non-existent, food unreliable, pain untreated. Where admiration of nature was not exactly high on the list when you could but fear the elements. Where the very idea of living forever is blacked out by the worry about living for another day.
You know that feeling when heat creeps up your neck, into your cheeks, the blushing that interferes with breathing? That was me: caught in my bubble of middle-class existence, originally not even tangentially aware how gratitude of the kind the poet references is linked to privilege. The privilege to have time to notice, room to appreciate, means to express and capacity to love nature within my safe surroundings.
I am not saying that homelessness precludes gratitude. On the contrary, I am often floored when seeing the generosity of spirit expressed by the folks I’ve gotten to know. I am more concerned with the demand characteristic or the taking for granted in my own head that the world is to be loved.
Mary Oliver’s work might have been to love the world. (She died this January – a remembrance from the New Yorker is in the link.) My work right now is to become more aware of how automatically we apply standards that seem self-evident to us – gratitude for nature! – but which are wholly inappropriate for those whose very existence is under attack. And then my work is to fight the causes for the differences in standard. Actually: the work of all of us. 38.000 houseless people in our city deserve that.
Photographs today are from another habitable building making room for another luxury hotel in downtown Portland.
Music today is from an interesting cross-over album Now and Then Music from the Great Depression(s) 2010/1929 ( to which we might add 2020, I gather.)
Louise A Palermo
A wake up call to the existence from which I am so carefully separated. This was a thought-provoking read. Thank you.
Susan Wladaver-Morgan
Another extraordinary piece. I love the way you combine your artistic and your social justice work in the world. You keep opening my eyes.
Martha Ullman West
A timely post. Last week’s issue of Street Roots informs us that six vendors have died in the last few weeks. I knew one of them quite well, but not well enough to know his last name. His first name was Kevin, and he sold Street Roots right outside my building when it still contained Starbucks, and he spoke good French, loved cats, and his world collapsed in the 2008 economic disaster, he told me, when he lost a corporate job in New York. He drank too much and that’s probably what killed him. He was kind, considerate, offered to help me by running errands (and he did run errands for some of my fellow residents here) and kept me posted about the sale of the building, the function or dysfunction of the elevator, and was stricken by the suicide of Anthony Bourdain. He came from privilege and he lost that privilege, and I think, I truly believe, he would think guilt about enjoying nature, enjoying one’s home, is misplaced. Action however is not, thank you Friderike for all that you do, including these photographs.