Kindred Spirits: Mary Oliver, Part II

A couple of years ago, in the midst of a period of a deep investigation and practice of mindfulness, I wondered aloud gleefully: why is there always so much poetry present whenever someone is writing, speaking or teaching about mindfulness?

At the time, I liked many of the answers I received from my peers who were also involved in the same deep engagement with mindfulness.  They included references to mystery and mysticism, the right brain, and that which is unnamable.

This past weekend though, upon reading the second chapter in American poet Mary Oliver’s (1935-) 2016 book Upstream,

I found one more:

Poetry teaches us how to inhabit the moment through the practice of inhabiting a poem. 

It was in her chapter called “My Friend Walt Whitman” in which she wrote:

First and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple-or a green field-a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing-an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness-wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak- to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.

I can’t tell you how quickly my sense of separation dissolves when someone else articulates an experience I have yet to put words to...

What a blessing to know I'm not alone.

Because at the same time I was starting to read Upstream, I had also been reading and re-reading (almost compulsively) a poem called “Moving Ahead” by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).

It’s like I just wanted, needed even, to exist and dwell inside this poem--to inhabit the poem--for reasons I know not why.

This poem, previously unknown to me, truly had felt like “a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel," just as Ms. Oliver had depicted in her book.

Having had this shared experience, I have now been re-inspired to look for more opportunities to inhabit the moment, which I imagine would have the unifying sensation of feeling into.

And just because I mentioned it, here is also "Moving Ahead" by Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by  American poet Robert Bly (1926-).

Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,

as if the banks through which it moves had widened out.

Trees and stones seem more like me each day,

and the paintings I see seem more seen into:

with my senses, as with the birds, I climb

into the windy heaven out of the oak,

and in the ponds broken off from the blue sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.