Mary Oliver & Martin Buber

“Praying”

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

from Mary Oliver, Thirst

In recent years, another of Oliver’s poems, or at least its coda, has emerged as a popular mantra. “The Summer Day” ends with a question that appears in classrooms and journals and on stickers and throughout social media:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

As with any phrase taken out of its original context, on its own the question is pithy. Sticky. It reverberates and nudges us into existential speculation, and (most disturbingly) it’s used to bolster a YOLO approach to life, that current heir to the lineage of “Carpe diem” and “You can’t take it with you.” It is an important question — as an educator I’ve appealed to this poem multiple times to invite students and colleagues into serious (and even not-so-serious) reflection — but it’s not the only question Oliver poses. She begins with three questions and concludes with three questions. The poem opens with broad possibilities for where her thinking might roam, but she pauses on what’s before her, on who is before her. She gives us her eyes to see the grasshopper as a grasshopper, doing grasshoppery things. It isn’t a metaphor to be dissected or a symbol to be appropriated, but just as we’re drawn into the daily life of the grasshopper, Oliver makes a sudden, almost defensive shift. “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” she confesses, but she does tell us that the discipline of paying attention is embodied, physical, and sensual, not cerebral and remote. And with a hint of desperation, before the more popular question, she asks:

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

“The Summer Day” seems to emerge from the kind of moment she describes in “Praying.” I don’t need to pick apart her words or structure — that’s not my intention here anyway. The poem typically resonates with me for two reasons. First, Oliver elegantly communicate what students of ritual (like me) struggle to capture. When I taught comparative religions, I frequently compared approaches to understanding religion to understanding an apple (or any piece of fruit, really): one approach is to observe it from the outside, noting aspects like form and color and how it occupies space; the other is to take a bite and to note how it feels and tastes. Ritual geeks walk around the apple, as is the way of academia, hoping to identify the intention of participants, the way the ritual facilitates some transformation, and what the actual outcome of the ritual is. Oliver takes a bite.

Second, while Oliver’s words paint prayer as a doorway, she points to the real effect of prayer, a relationship on the other side of the door. This reminds me of a book that hit me like a steamroller in college and to which I return every few years, Martin Buber’s I and Thou. If you haven’t read it, here’s a thumbnail (and hugely reduced) summary: The book is an extended meditation on relationships, the majority of which are, literally, objective (in which we treat each other as objects). In authentic relationships, though, we treat ourselves and each other as subjects. “All actual life,” any real living that we’re doing, “is encounter.” (62) “Extended,” he wrote, “the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You [God]. Every single You is a glimpse of that.” (123) Every authentic encounter, every moment in subjective relationship, is a glimpse of the divine. More specifically, Buber expounds a kind of proverb:

When you fathom the life of things and of conditionality, you reach the indissoluble; when you dispute the life of things and of conditionality, you wind up before the nothing; when you consecrate life you encounter the living God.” (125–126)

Recognizing this allows us to see the radical unity of creation with its source, and our “knowledge of duality,” our typical relegation of our experience into this-or-that classification, “is reduced to silence by the paradox of the primal mystery.” (149) Buber’s thinking has impacted my own thinking and more importantly how I understand what it means to be in relationship, what it means to be human.

A few weeks ago, at the start of our social isolation, my husband and I took up the project of weeding the little patch between our driveway and the sidewalk. We hadn’t taken very good care of the spot, and it was overgrown with weeds and untamed grasses. I felt a certain efficiency and a sense of flow while ripping weeds and unwanted plants from the plot, and my nascent ability to spot and uproot blackberry leaves (my thumbs are not green) and other stubborn and unsightly plants gave me a twinge of pride. When we consulted a landscaper (after the fact…of course), we pointed to a few of the unsightly spikes we hadn’t gotten to (what looked like elephantine leeks springing up), and she cautioned us, saying, “Oh, you don’t want to get rid of those, do you? Or don’t you like irises?”

I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a home with irises. If I did, I certainly hadn’t noticed. I mean, I like Van Gogh’s paintings, and I’ve always enjoyed the flamboyant purple tongues popping up in other folks’ gardens, but without that bloom, they struck me as no lovelier than the compost bin under our sink. I could’ve researched what they were (there’s even an app for that, reducing pretty much all effort required). I could’ve paused when I recognized that they were sturdier than the grasses and weeds we were ousting. Now, knowing what I didn’t before, when I walk through our neighborhood and see seas of irises in a garden or along a sidewalk, I cringe with Irish-Catholic guilt from my dual sin of commission (yep, I uprooted it) and omission (I could’ve done better).

Today, “Praying” strikes me as a gentle but bold invitation. She reminds us that it doesn’t have to be complicated — it just has to be authentic; that it doesn’t have to be directed with confidence or faith — just openness and gratitude. I don’t have to shape the perfect garden. I don’t have to learn how to make sourdough or Kondo my home. I don’t have to fill my time with external or productive or innovative things. I do, however, have the opportunity to sit still; I have the time to notice, to get comfortable with silence; and more than ever, I have an opening to encounter and to consecrate life.

Martin Buber, I and Thou. tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1970.
Mary Oliver, Thirst. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.

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This is the second of a series of writing prompts to invite some dialogue. If you feel so moved, please respond to the text or to an idea in the space below. A few requests:

• Be kind. No ad hominem. Don’t pick a fight or attack me or someone else.
• Be true. Speak from your experience, and speak factually. Don’t put words in anyone else’s mouth.
• Be responsive. Stay relevant and on topic. Be open to response.
• Be concise. Say what you mean, and mean what you say. And remember that people stop reading at a certain point.