Mind Body Mama: Pay Attention

I had an opportunity to see Mary Oliver read a few weeks ago. The venerable poet visited our women’s college for the first time in a decade. Her last visit was scheduled for the small and comfortable subterranean auditorium next to the library. But an hour before she was scheduled to speak there were 600 people in their seats and public safety sent us on a pilgrimage across campus to the larger hall to appease the fire marshall.

It was an early introduction for me to this odd pocket of America where I live. It is a place where, when I go to the grocery store on the eve of a blizzard, they will have sold out of kale. It is a place where an eagle release at the wildlife sanctuary attracts more viewers than the parking lot can accommodate. It is a place where there are a seemingly equal number of churches and lesbians.

It is a place where a Mary Oliver reading now goes nearly unpublicized, so that only 2,000 people will show up. There is no bigger hall on campus to which we might move.

Among the two thousand were many from Our House of Worship and many others from The School of Love. But I sat alone, as I like to do at readings, and felt the healing balm of words and introspection, inspiration and presence roll over me.

Oliver told us in person—as she tells us in her poetry over and over again—that her job is to pay attention. “My work,” she says in the poem Messenger, the first she read that night, “which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

And she told us to pay attention. This may have been a quote from an essay, or it may have been her answer to a question, or both. I lapped up the light she brought but lost track of some of the details of attribution.

I know that she said, “Pay attention.” And also, “Tell someone.”

I thought of the many lives that might have been lived by a Mary Oliver. She could have been a mother, paying attention to the natural world she loves and telling her children what she noticed. She could have been a minister sharing insight with a small flock. Instead, here she was speaking this one night to two thousand, who in the morning would mention to thousands of others where they had spent the evening, and their friends would groan to have missed it. Instead of a small life of reflection she has had a huge life of words and books upon books, prize upon prize, honor upon honor.

Her reach is extraordinary; it was noted in the introduction how many times any of us will hear a Mary Oliver poem as part of a sermon or memorial or other ceremony. But she made me believe that any of us can do this; and isn’t this what we mean by ministry anyway? The ways that we pay attention and witness that which is holy to us; the ways that we share that spark with others.

I read Catherine Newman’s latest article in Brain, Child the same week.

(It is starting to feel creepy to venerate Catherine here, as she actually resides in our odd little outpost. She lives across the big water as Dusty likes to say, but we do have kids the same age and know people in common. For example, Dusty knows her. I have even had occasion to say “hello” to her, although it was hard to do so without melting into a steaming puddle of hero worship. Eventually I know I’ll have to get over it, both for social expediency and because hero-worship, even when so well deserved, is an insidous way of counting oneself out. “She is great!” says the happy angel of hero worship. “Therefore you suck!” says her evil twin.)

Catherine’s essay about “conjoined twins and other lessons in sharing”—just read it, it is brilliant—made me think about the fact that the writer’s task, in addition to paying attention, is making connections between the the things that she observes and the things that she thinks. And this drive to connection—to meaning-making, as we call it at Our House of Worship—is to me an essentially spiritual activity.

My writing teacher Kate Hopper encouraged us to relax into association to create humor. I love to write that way, to unwind my mind and let my thoughts wander to the absurd. I love to teach movement that way, and sometimes I am blessed to find an image that helps my students understand the principles behind what we are doing. Sometimes that is the only way to enter a new experience: we must make sense of what something is by describing what it is like.

It is how we learn, connecting the dots between what we already know and the unfolding mystery of what comes next. It is also the bedrock of faith: how we come to trust that our small experience reflects the greater mystery that holds it. “Fluency in the use of metaphor,” the Rev. Kendyl Gibbons calls it, this mark of spiritual intelligence.

Not all of us can be a Mary Oliver, but isn’t she right when she tells us all to pay attention? Each of us can love the natural world, if that is where we find the divine—but we can also pay attention to a kiss, to gratitude, to love, to a dog, to a child. We can find the wonder, the meaning, the bigger picture. Isn't the work of all our lives?