A while ago now I started to read Mary Oliver's poetry. It started when I was looking for something else. Now I think of it, quite a lot of my more enjoyable discoveries have come while looking for something else. Which is an important life lesson; always be ready to receive the unexpected as a surprise, not a diversion, as a gift, not a nuisance.
I don't remember what it was I was looking for - probably a poem by someone else. But I've never forgotten and always been grateful for discovering the poetry of a woman who teaches us over and over, to pay attention to beauty, to see what is there as a gift, to look generously and thankfully at trees and rivers, flowers and birds, clouds and rain, to look at the world - and see the whole blessed thing as beatitude.
I try to do that. In any case long before Mary Oliver, Jesus was telling folk to do the same. So yesterday, in the gardens at Drum Castle, we went to see the whole blessed thing. And it reminded me again of Mary Oliver's gift to those who read her poems - see what you look at, pay attention, stop long enough to wonder, then say thank you.
Roses
Everyone now and again wonders about
those questions that have no ready
answers: first cause, God's existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing,
not going to the mall, not the Super
Bowl.
"Wild roses," I said to them one morning.
"Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?"
The roses laughed softly. "Forgive us,"
they said. "But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses."
Mary Oliver.
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