dual personalities

Tag: Mary Oliver

January 24, 2019

Guiding light

by chuckofish

How about a little Mumford & Sons to get you started this morning?

I meant to mention earlier that Mary Oliver, the poet, died last week. Known for her “secular psalms,” she has been dubbed by some “the unofficial poet laureate” of the Unitarian Universalist denomination. Well, then. I liked her anyway.

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –
a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

You can read about her here and here.

I will also note that on this day in 1848 James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento. Our great-great-great grandfather, Silas Hough, went west the following year to seek his fortune, but died of cholera just east of the Rocky Mountains.

Screen Shot 2019-01-23 at 12.27.49 PM.pngHis 16-year old son, our great-great grandfather John Simpson Hough who had accompanied him, went home to Philadelphia. He didn’t stay long though. He had seen the Rocky Mountains and there was no holding him back.

And, hey, this was an interesting interview. (I had never heard of this book. I may have to read it.)

When people talk about poverty, there are different kinds. There is a poverty of status in our country where you have all the food and water you need but you think other people are doing better all around you. You can also have a poverty of control. You feel you can’t choose how you spend your day, when to get up. We don’t talk about those kinds of poverty a lot.

Food for thought.

(The painting is Sunrise on the Mountains at the Head of Moraine Park, Near Estes Park, about 1920, by Charles Partridge Adams, CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder

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September 7, 2017

Life is what we make it

by chuckofish

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“I look back on my life like a good day’s work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”

Wise words from Grandma Moses, who was born Anna Mary Robertson on this day in 1860. She died in 1961 at the age of 101. Having worked hard all her life, she then became famous as a renowned folk artist in her seventies. You can read her obituary here.

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P.S. In looking around the internet, I found that everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt and Marilyn Monroe to Hannah Montana are credited with saying, “Life is what you make it!” Several books have been written with this title. I guess cliches are like that.

Well, anyway, here’s a poem from Mary Oliver:

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Discuss among yourselves.

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September 30, 2016

You can do it!

by chuckofish

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This made me LOL.

Also it got me thinking about support and encouragement, which are all very well and good, but lest we forget, here’s a word from Ralph Waldo Emerson on self-reliance:

“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.”

And a poem by Mary Oliver to get you moving:

THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3)

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Have a good weekend. October will be here tomorrow! The last quarter of the year is upon us. Let us make good use of it.

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