Wild and Precious
Poet Mary Oliver died yesterday. This leaves a hole in my heart that 
I picture as leaf-shaped.
I didn’t grow up knowing her writing. At Virginia Commonwealth University, I had a dear faculty colleague who loved her, and would post her poetry at regular intervals – usually as a reflection on her own life or the life of our culture, but always for me it was also a gift to me – it often felt like Oliver, or my friend, were speaking directly to me. Bonnie would post the scrap from an Oliver poem and, because of my respect and love for Bonnie and a desire to see things the way she saw them, I would track down, like a detective, the full verse, and let it minister to me the way it had to her.
. . . like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks.
* * *
. . . we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly.
* * *
. . . the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue.
* * *
. . . a pack as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it on one shoulder.
Though Oliver is greatly beloved among UUs, her poetry never reached me that way; it took this steady love from a friend – of Oliver and of me – for it to sink in.
Because of Bonnie, I got at 43 the poem I needed at 24, about saving the only life I could save – and though it arrived decades too late, it was also right on time. Oliver also asked of herself, and me, a crucial question:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
The question, I remember, made me anxious — but I eventually answered with one of the favorite-ever pieces of my own writing:
Lifetime To Do List:
– Love Passionately
– Help Someone Else Make It
– Grow Something
– Help Right an Injustice
– Make Something Beautiful
– Reflect and Center
– Choose Happiness
– Repeat
I was a college professor then – a job and a role I loved for a time, but one whose culture pulled me in a million ways off course from this simple list. The academy will never tell you it’s time to go home, you’ve done enough, and I learned over time that the part of the job I had loved imagining myself doing, I would never be permitted to do, and that the part that I had done and loved doing, I could do elsewhere, with greater ease and honesty. I love the written word and feel the debt I owe to it – but before one can celebrate letters at the university, it seems there are myriad hoops to jump through, only some of which I am fit for, and some of which are not fit for me. And so I gave up on teaching literature to become a catcher in the rye, which I have, in fact, always been.
This new chapter has been one of the great gifts of my life – and Bonnie, and Mary Oliver, and all of you have helped me to be ready to receive it. Whatever may come next for me in this wild and precious life, I am grateful to have landed for a time among you. I feel an answer to my calling, and relish a kind of work that uses all my muscles for such worthy ends.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay
in this world.
May I be enough.