Tag Archives: Mary Oliver

July and August Again

“Meanwhile the world goes on,” says Mary Oliver. I repeat her poems to myself like mantras—for comfort. Lately I am finding it hard to achieve balance in my life. I want to focus on myself, but I don’t want to sink too far into myself. I want to want things, but I don’t want to obsess over them. I want to feel everything, but not too intensely. Or maybe I do. In retrospect, I always do (it makes for better writing). But I cannot control everything. I can barely control anything. It must be necessary to let go of that urge to dictate the timeline that the world has for me. Otherwise I am wrenching myself from the hands of greater forces.

Taking my own advice this month has been hard. I have been living extrovertedly this month, and now I find that I cannot be alone. I am proud of the person I am, but also seeking nervous attachment. It kind of sucks that the struggle to achieve healthy self-esteem is a lifelong process. Somewhat relatedly: I have a hard time accepting that nothing is really innately fair. The world owes us nothing, but we owe the world everything!

I am on a plane and missing optimism. But it will find me again soon because these things are cyclical. I will make something and return to myself shortly. I will listen to “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” and think about movies. I will eat some pesto. I will put these thoughts out into the ether like I do every month, letting them float there miraculously as lines of code and otherwise meaningless symbols. Meanwhile the world goes on.

On Living: Mary Oliver and the Woods

So I don’t post much on this blog beyond my end-of-month posts, but today I was absolutely floored by a Mary Oliver poem and had to put my thoughts down. Here is the poem:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
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.


“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

I don’t know what to say. But here are words anyways. Mary Oliver is a genius. I don’t know how she gets away with so much little repetition, yet manages to keep pace in this poem. I don’t know why the choice of “three things” works so well when this is not a fairytale. I don’t know how she can get away with using the word “salvation.” I don’t know how I can see the Blackwater Woods in my mind now, though I have never been to Cape Cod.

I love the woods. I love the cyclic nature of the woods. I love the peace and the slow growth. I love big existence. Nature is a trope that is all at once so overdone, so necessary, and so true. I don’t know! This poem makes me so emotional; it makes me think about how there are so many things and people I want to hold against my bones. And how everything is so ephemeral. But still, it is better this way.

Here are some songs that give me a similar feeling: the bigness of life and existence. The smallness of today in the scheme of everything. Enjoy them today and every day.

I think this song is in a famous movie from the past thirty years. I don’t remember which one.
This song is so phenomenal and so beautiful. I think the title is genius too.
This song makes me want to be in love.