Friday, July 16, 2010

Mindful

Every day

I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -

but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

How does Mary write one poem after another like this? Her daily presentations are causing a shift in me. If you’ve been reading along with me, I wonder if the same is true for you? Every day for the last 196 days I awake to Mary, reflect, and write here. She is helping me become more wise in several important areas. I sense a greater acceptance of reality just as it is – including suffering, death, and human fumbling and bumbling. Her poems speak of the constant beauty in the hard to accept, and so I see this more clearly now. I dare to presume that there may be a twinge more mindfulness in my day as well. The drab and the daily have astounding stories to tell. Take our common House Sparrow here in the U.S.A. If they could talk, what would they say? What prayers do they offer to the world in their seemingly mundane daily occurrence? Would they tell us how they are endangered in their home territory of Europe and how their cousin, the Tree Sparrow of Europe and Asia, were killed by the millions upon millions in 1958 in China. Mao Zedong commanded the people to kill this bird so there would be grain for export. They did as they were instructed and in turn, the absence of this bird led to the over population of locusts, which led to the worst famine in history, killing some 30 million Chinese in the following year. So thank you dear Mary for helping me see the lives of sparrows, grass, and family members as grateful prayers.


What might the drab and mundane say to you?

5 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. (Sorry, the typos in that first comment were too confusing.)

    LoriKim, I am so very happy to find your blog. I was googling A Year with Rumi to see if my RUMI DAYS blog would show up; it did, on page 7, along with your blog. Because I am a big Mary Oliver fan, I had to come and see. I am typing up Rumi poems from that devotional book I googled, every day, and it is a luxury. Now, to have Mary Oliver on a daily basis like this is adding to the bliss. Thank you for doing this, I'm following you now.

    By the way, if you follow my profile back, my main blog is synch-ro-ni-zing, where I sometimes try to write a poem that is more often than not inspired in some way by Oliver's genius to do what seems impossible, as you say, over and over again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sorry I misspelled your name, LoraKim. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's okay. I like the Lori too (Australian way of saying parrot as opposed to Spanish). Your website is beautiful!

    LoraKim

    ReplyDelete
  5. This article gives the light in which we can observe the reality. This is very nice one and gives indepth information. Thanks for this nice article. Mindful

    ReplyDelete