Damaged and undamaged

I read a poem by Mary Oliver today that I had never read before. It evoked a sense of the strange harmony between the damaged and undamaged regions within each of us. Here is the poem-




Mysteries, Yes


Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.




How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.


How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.


How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.




Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.


Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.


(from the book Evidence, 2009)


I have noticed a tendency within myself to hide, minimize, and avoid any sense of hurt or damage. My vanity wants to be flawlessly spiritual and joyful. But lately I"m more interested in honesty and courage and facing with kindness the pain within myself and others. I'm interested in integrating the long rejected feelings, swallowing them in the mouth of nonjudgmental awareness and love.

Mary Oliver notes that both delight and the scars of damage attract a person to the comfort of a poem. On one level, or from one perspective, I have been damaged and I have inflicted damage. On the temporal plane, who has never been damaged or inflicted damage?

It is our universal lot. Yet from another perspective, on another level, every being is wholly inviolate, undamaged, intact. The paradox is that opposite facts are simultaneously true.

Today I'm interested in a new relationship with painful memories when they arise. It is possible to be a space of loving acceptance for what arises. This is something I am learning very, very slowly and gently.

Planted here in the undamaged wholeness of reality, a reconciliation occurs as feelings of shame and damage come out of hiding and are not banned but received. It's time to end the internal holocaust where unflattering feelings were sent to the gas chambers. Let the damaged and undamaged regions within enjoy a mysterious harmony.

(Note: Thank you to Fred Lamotte of yourradiance.blogspot for post 3/25/10 about embracing and honoring wounds and disabilities, which led to these reflections.)

~

Mary Oliver: "A bride married to amazement"

Mary Oliver feels the life that moves through her and she writes a poem. She has voyaged far into the Fact of being alive. She jots down notes with more than scientific rigor. The austere exuberance of the soul takes shape. Inspired, we embark into our own uniqueness. We feel the vessel of being.

Mary Oliver is not trying to manipulate the environment or extract nectar from the now, she is simply voicing the sounds that take passage through her.

What I like about Mary Oliver is she's not trying to enlighten me. She is not patronizing. She does not beam down on me like some paragon of wisdom. She's not trying to change me or save me.

Her words are a fresh shock of life, an ocean wave bowing on the shore.

Truth has no agenda.
It has no agenda because it has no lack.

Mary Oliver feels the truth deep within herself, and she is one with it, and from that oneness words appear. There's nothing extra added, no cartwheels for applause, no hidden plea for approval. No frills, no phoniness, no hurry, and no avoidance. Her poems and prose are solid and trustworthy, and they strike the chord of integrity at the center of each of us.

Because she's not trying to change me, the part of me that is changeless hears her. She's not trying to help me and reading her words I recognize where I am not in need of any help. Intactness lives within me.

There's no extra noise. Mary Oliver says that most people, whether they realize it or not, write because they want to be liked. I can see this in myself, I can be a pick-pocket trying to lift a bit of approval from others. I don't need to condemn this desire for affection. It's part of our humanity and there's nothing wrong with it.

But I'm also interested in tapping into a deeper motivation than the longing to be liked.

Mary Oliver loves her unknown reader. Whoever we are, wherever we are, she loves us quietly, you can feel it behind the words of her poems. The space behind and around the words of her poems communicate too. I'm sometimes startled when reading Mary Oliver by a sudden daring to love myself and others unabashedly.

Mary Oliver has a passion for the real, while remaining keenly aware that the real is not something that can be captured.

Mary Oliver is not trying to tell me the answer, she's not even trying to find the answer. She is enraptured with the question. She lives as the question itself: a bride married to amazement.

Thank you Mary Oliver.

Note: "A bride married to amazement" is from Mary Oliver's poem When Death Comes

Banquet

I came across an eye-opening passage from Anthony de Mello's book Awareness (p. 26, excerpt).

"Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death. There's a story about some people who were on a raft off the coast of Brazil perishing from thirst. They had no idea that the water they were floating on was fresh water. The river was coming out into the sea with such force that it went out for a couple of miles, so they had fresh water right there where they were. But they had no idea. In the same way, we're surrounded with joy, with happiness, with love. Most people have no idea of this whatsoever."

As I type this, a new Mary Oliver poem that just came out in the spring Parabola issue floats to mind. Let me close by sharing this poem, which my husband Greg also loved. Every time I have read this poem it has had a new layer of meaning to me. It's related to the above passage from de Mello in my mind.


In Your Hands

The dog, the donkey, surely they know
they are alive.
Who would argue otherwise?

But now, after years of consideration,
I am getting beyond that.
What about the sunflowers? What about
the tulips, and the pines?

Listen, all you have to do is start and
there'll be no stopping.
What about mountains? What about water
slipping over the hard-skinned rocks?

And, speaking of stones, what about
the little ones you can
hold in your hands, their heartbeats
so secret, so hidden it may take years

before, finally, you hear them?