…or perhaps just picking up where I left off…

So, I’m here again to dust off this old blog. It has been quite a while since I have mustered the discipline to write regularly, just not making it a priority for a couple of years. After some encouragement from loved ones near and far, I’ve decided to pick it up again. Not that I expect wide readership, but I think that if nothing else I will appreciate the time capsule of part of my life recorded here, where I will mostly likely talk about what I’m reading, listening to, watching, observing, thinking, feeling.

Today I began the discipline by updating my Inspiring Lives page, looking at obituaries from 2016 to now. Wow. 2016 was really a terrible year for loss of public figures who meant a lot to me and my generation. I remember well going through that time, on social media people were declaring 2016 the worst year ever, as more and more of our role models and icons died. Not to mention the presidential election inexplicably going to Donald Trump, which was the real tragedy that year. At the time I was super sad, but I also thought to myself “this isn’t the worst year…..that is yet to come.” Indeed, the years that followed have been pretty terrible. But at the same time, for me personally, I have much to be thankful for, and I remember every day all that I am grateful for.

But I digress.

Mary Oliver died last week. My social media feed was overwhelmed with grief at her passing. It’s odd how comforting it is to share in the collective grief online, reading the quotes from her poetry that people chose to share in their remembering what she and her work have meant to them. Honestly, though I majored in literature and I have a real love for beautiful writing, poetry is not something that I have read regularly in my adult life since college. I have certainly read many Mary Oliver poems that friends and family have shared with me over the years, but I can’t claim the attachment to her that many others I know do. I am certainly saddened by her death, and inspired by her life, and like, I suspect, many others, my appreciation of her work will grow, especially now that she has passed. A notable death is a moment in time to appreciate and learn from a life well-lived. One of the many reasons I love a good obit.

Since Oliver’s passing on January 17, there have been many excellent articles about her life and the impact of her work. They are all worth reading. And then afterwords, get to reading her original words!

• From the wonderful BrainPickings website, they republished a post from 2015 about Oliver’s life with the photographer Molly Malone Cook.
• Another from BrainPickings: Mary Oliver on commitment to a creative life from 2016.
• “Mary Oliver on Grief and Loss“, from the New York Times.
• “Mary Oliver’s Deep, Direct Love for the World”, from the New Yorker.
• “Listening to the World”, an interview with Krista Tippet for On Being.

I taught a yoga class this week, and was inspired to conclude it with a Mary Oliver poem that I found. I thought it was fitting as it was about how the spirit occupies the body, something that I think about a lot in my yoga practice.

Poem

by Mary Oliver

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time
sweetness
and tangibility to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is —

so it enters us —
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.