In the Pinewoods with Mary Oliver

It's 5:00am. I'm up early with candle lit to spend time with you and one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. If you've not read her before, the suggestion is to drop everything, even reading this and get yourself a copy of any book of poetry by her, favs are Twelve Moons and House of Light. She writes of her greatest love--Mama Nature, with an intimacy so real, she puts you there. Miss Oliver was said to step outside her door, gone for hours to fall inside a time warp of communion, with the trees, creatures, birds, flowers...where she gave her heart over to it and wrote of her experience. Such awareness, such mindfulness. such close attention, was her life and she takes us there, inside her perception. As I flip through House of Light, trying to determine which to share, Miss Oliver speaks...

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods  

I'd seen 
their footprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I 

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This 
is not a poem about a dream, 
though it could be. 

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them--I swear it!--

would have come into my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity
and they went off together through 
the trees. When I woke
I was alone. 

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray. 

Sweet Little Does ~ swim, flow, pray through your summer day. May you taste beauty and light, and may every good thing, lead you home, home, home to the precious life within and all around. Amen.