“When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.”
“There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god.” ~Mary Oliver
Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) —was an American poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allowed us to look intimately at a world not of our making. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry can be characterized by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. She won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2007, she was declared to be the country’s best-selling poet. She was a poet who had many “greatest hits”, and she knew this. It amused her, more than anything, that a sonneteer who wrote mostly about the natural world could have a back catalogue that the public thought about at all, let alone printed out and hung over their desks, or clamored for at readings, or quoted at length on social media.
Reflection Questions
1) Does nature leave you with a sense of salvation?
2) How can poetry and nature better help you connect with the Divine?
