Devotions: Mary Olivers Artual for living

Photo by Rachel Giese Brown

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ― Mary Oliver

“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ― Mary Oliver

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” ― Mary Oliver

Artual (Art + Ritual) for living

The following phrase is coined by Whitney Freya, spiritual artist and healer. Whitney believes that using the medium of art is a portal to merge healing, energy, and awareness thru the practice, ritual, and play of intentional creativity. We all are creative and ultimately artists.

Before you state, “I’m not creative nor an artist,” I argue that you are. Any time you put your heart and soul into any activity or a cause you are creating art. Art can take its form as: completing a data program for quality assurance, teaching a class, showing up at a demonstration, writing an article for our newsletter, singing in the car, gardening, making colorful cupcakes for a meal train… It is a piece of yourself that you share with the world.

Think about it this way. What do you like to make? And, if you could make it all day long.... that is your art.

April is national poetry month. One of my favorite Ohio born, Pulitzer Prize winning poets is Mary Oliver. She recently published a collection of her favorites spanning over her more than fifty-year career: Devotions. What I like about Mary’s poems is her ability to make them accessible to all audiences. Her poems are powerful observations that bridge the natural world with everyday emotions—some tender and some full of joy. When I read one of her poems, I feel like I'm there with her walking in the woods or looking across the lake and can hear her inner dialogue.

Since her partner of forty years died ( photographer Molly Malone Cook, 2005), Mary has become more open by sharing herself with the public. During lectures and interviews, she talks about her writing process: walking in the woods with little hand-sewn notebooks, scribbling thoughts which come to her, then turning these thoughts into poems. She states repeatedly, “the woods saved her life.” Mary talks about how nature gave her insight and strength and wisdom. Nature gave her strength to publish.

I hold the same thoughts about creativity as Mary: “It’s a gift to yourself but it’s a gift to anybody who has a hunger for it.”

Below is one of my favorite “Mary poems” found in Devotions and originally published in From White Pine, 1994. 

Blackberry Picking by Queena Stovall (1887-1980)

Learn more about her folk art

August
by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the branches
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.


Artual Activity:
Take a walk in the woods with a scribbling pad. Jot down your thoughts.

At home, review your notes and write a haiku.   Be bold and share it below.

Here is one for the season from me.

Flurried gusts

Saplings revel in the snow

Elders twist and groan

Quick review: a haiku is an unrhymed three-lined poem based on a Japanese poetic form. The first line and last line has five syllables each, and the middle line has seven.

Line 1: 5 syllables
Line 2: 7 syllables
Line 3: 5 syllables

Updated 4/16/2018

On Being with Mary Oliver https://onbeing.org/programs/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world/ 

NPR with Mary Oliver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMrBN0enNJI 

Maria Shriver interviews Mary Oliver http://www.oprah.com/spirit/maria-shriver-interview-poet-mary-oliver-o-magazine-poetry-issue