Celebrating Mary Oliver & Asking: Do We Want to Be the Kind of People Celebrating Mary Oliver, or the Kind Celebrating Karen Pence & John Finnis?

That's the big question, the one the world throws at you each morning, "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?" 

     ~ Mary Oliver, Long Life (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004), p. xiv. 

In the News: Sixth Mass Extinction of Species Now Underway

In her review of Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction (NY: Henry Holt, 2014), Louise Rubacky notes that Kolbert's thesis — that humankind has precipitated the sixth planet-wide mass extinction of species, and this has already begun — warns of dire consequences when we "break evolutionary chains." Every species now disappearing had its niche in the complex, interwoven, delicate ecology that sustains the whole planet. And the loss of even a single species threatens to unbalance a web of relationships necessary to sustain life as we have come to know it on this planet.

Photographer Isa Leshko on Elderly Animals

New Year's Advice to Young People Struggling with Questions about Sexual Orientation: You Are Not the Problem and You Count

Christmas came, and the year has turned, and something is on my heart to share. As I noted on Christmas day, the holiday times--the church-and-family-oriented holiday times--can be rough for gay and lesbian family members (and, certainly, for others living alone or demeaned by family). Holiday times can be times of turmoil and pain for younger LGBTQ people, and when the turmoil and pain attached to family gatherings are reinforced by homophobic religious pontificating, as they were this year in the Catholic context, the assault on the psyches of young gay or gender-questioning people struggling to find their way in the world can be acute.

Journal Entry from the Past: The Challenge of Hearing the Scriptures in the Churches Today

Another journal entry: this one is from 11 Aug. 1997.  I'm commenting on Mary Oliver's poetry, with its constant intrusion of the surprising divine, and the occlusion of scripture for many us today who find more scriptural force, at times, in non-biblical sources (like Oliver's poetry, for me) than we do in the scriptures themselves.  In the Scriptures as they're handed and proclaimed to us by our churches, that is . . . . 

For National Poetry Month: Mary Oliver's "Some Questions You Might Ask"

For National Poetry Month and for Earth Day:

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

From House of Light (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990)

For National Poetry Month: Mary Oliver's "The Journey"

And for National Poetry Month, another poem—this from Mary Oliver’s 1986 volume Dream Work:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.