RARE PEARLS OF GIFTED INSPIRATION- MARY OLIVER / “WILD GEESE”

Last week I briefly shared my feelings on inspiration and my fascination with those “rare pearls” that some artists experience as if they were gifted to them. Songs or poems that felt like they just came, all they had to do was write them down.⁣

“Wild Geese” is one of these gems, which originally started as an exercise in technique but once Mary Oliver started writing, it was the poem and it never changed.⁣
In an “On Being” interview with the brilliant Krista Tippett, she adds:⁣
“It was there in me. ⁣
Yes. ⁣
Once I heard those geese and said that line about anguish — and where that came from, I don’t know. ⁣
I’d say that’s one of the poems that…that just came.”⁣

Original audio of Mary Oliver reading the poem, which I combined with footage from the 1973 film ‘The Flight of the Snow Geese’ by Jen and Des Bartlett.⁣

⁣WILD GEESE⁣
You do not have to be good.⁣
You do not have to walk on your knees⁣
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.⁣
You only have to let the soft animal of your body⁣
love what it loves.⁣
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.⁣
Meanwhile the world goes on.⁣
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain⁣
are moving across the landscapes,⁣
over the prairies and the deep trees,⁣
the mountains and the rivers.⁣
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,⁣
are heading home again.⁣
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,⁣
the world offers itself to your imagination,⁣
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -⁣
over and over announcing your place⁣
in the family of things.⁣
- Mary Oliver

I truly love this poem, it feels like a meditation on wholeness and I am grateful that it exists.⁣

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In the crotch of the Fig Tree

My beautiful friend M. reminded me of Sylvia Plath and her often cited Fig Tree metaphor from ‘The Bell Jar’ today.

The passage is beautiful and relatable.
How paralysing it can be, to feel like you have to make decisions that will rule out other possibilities and that not deciding at all, will lead to decay…

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Then, when we turn to the next page, Esther eats and as her body feels better, her mind calms too.
I loved this reminder.
One might not know what to do, feel lost in thoughts or fighting demons. 
But while we are sitting in the crotch of our personal Fig Tree- the best we can do, is try to be kind to our bodies.
Eat, sleep, warm and be gentle.
And perhaps, a patch of blue sky will slowly come into view over the tree’s crown.
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Happy New Year - The Music Crept By us

THE MUSIC CREPT BY US

I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year’s Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance
- Leonard Cohen
from ‘Flowers For Hitler’

Happy New Year, here’s to more dancing in 2021.
Because, to quote the wonderful Gregory Orr:
”If we're not supposed to dance, why all this music?”
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BLUE

“The French called this time of day 'l'heure bleue.' 
To the English it was 'the gloaming.' 
The very word 'gloaming' reverberates, echoes - the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour - carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. 
During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come. 
As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice; the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone... Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.”

- Joan Didion
(From Blue Nights)

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.”
[…]

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.”

- Rebecca Solnit
(From a Field Guide to Getting Lost)

Sky above Clouds III by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1963.

[…]
Don’t stand there 
with your offerings of dead sheep, 
chunks of wood, young children, blood, 

your wet eyes, your body 
gentle and taut with love, 
assuming I can do nothing about it 
but accept, accept, accept. 

I’m not the sea, I’m not pure blue, 
I don’t have to take 

anything you throw into me. 
I close myself over, deaf as an eye, 
deaf as a wound, which listens 

to nothing but its own pain: 
Get out of here. 
Get out of here. 

- Margaret Atwood
(From Selected Poems: 1965-1975)

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s cyanometer, an instrument to measure the blueness of the sky (ca. 1760).

P.S.

I close my eyes and see

a seagull in the desert,
high, against unbearably blue sky.

There is hope in the past.

I am writing to you
all the time, I am writing

with both hands,
day and night.

- Franz Wright

Femme bleue assise IV by Henri Matisse.

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness.
I am still looking for the beauty in that.”

- Maggie Nelson
(From Bluets)

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Letters

Answers to Letters

In the bottom drawer of my desk I come across a letter that first arrived twenty-six years ago. A letter in panic, and it’s still breathing when it arrives the second time.

A house has five windows: through four of them the day shines clear and still. The fifth faces a black sky, thunder and storm. I stand at the fifth window. The letter.

Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years may be passed in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and voices, you can hear yourself walking past there on the other side.

Was the letter ever answered? I don’t remember, it was long ago. The countless thresholds of the sea went on migrating. The heart went on leaping from second to second like the toad in the wet grass of an August night.

The unanswered letters pile high up, like cirro-stratus clouds presaging bad weather. They make the sunbeams lustreless. One day I will answer. 

One day when I am dead and can at last concentrate. Or at least so far away from here that I can find myself again. When I’m walking, newly arrived, in the big city, on 125th Street, in the wind on the street of dancing garbage. I who love to stray off and vanish in the crowd, a capital T in the mass of the endless text.

- Tomas Tranströmer (1981)

Light

Alice Roosevelt died on Valentine’s Day of 1884, just 36 hours after giving birth to a daughter.
She was just 22 years old and passed away in the arms of her loving husband, future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
On the same day, in the same house, Roosevelt had already said a final goodbye to his mother, Martha “Mittie”, who had died of typhoid fever.

Theodore's diary entry for that day read as follows:

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Reality

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.
- Jeanette Winterson

Picture by Alva Bernadine

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Things To Do

When asked for his definition of paradise, Johnny Cash replied:
“This morning, with her, having coffee.”

The following to-do list by Johnny, sold at an auction in 20110 for $6,250.
Remarkable, as to me it seems invaluable.
❤️ 

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One of Maurice Sendak’s best compliments

I absolutely adore this story by the late, great and lovely Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are:

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it.
I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over.
I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it.
I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.”
Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.”
That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received.
He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything.
He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

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Dogfish

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?

Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story – - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

- Mary Oliver