A Season of Soul Convelescing

I first came across the works of Mary Oliver in the Fall of 2011, when I was a visiting scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. I look back at that season of my life with a particular tenderness. It was a season of quiet solitude, though I did not know at first how much I needed it. The storms of a personal crisis had begun to pass, but storms do not leave simply because the rain has stopped. They leave the earth saturated, the trees shaken, the windows still rattling in memory. There are wounds that continue to ache long after the event that caused them has gone silent. I was, in some sense, learning again how to inhabit my own life.

There were nights when I would wake suddenly, cold and sweating, pulled from sleep by some old scene that the daylight had persuaded me to forget. The body, it seems, keeps its own archive. But there were also mornings when I would rise and discover that the world had not ended. There was coffee. There were books. There were classrooms and library tables, quiet conversations in hallways, the soft rustle of pages turning, and long afternoon walks beneath the California sun. The ordinary became medicinal. Academia, with its curious rhythms of reading, thinking, listening, and wondering, gave my mind something to do while my spirit slowly found its way home.

Looking back, I think that was what the season was: a kind of soul convalescing. Not recovery in the dramatic sense, not some sudden epiphany in which everything was made right, but the slower and more mysterious work of becoming whole again. Like a body recovering from an illness, the soul needed rest, nourishment, gentle movement, and time. I needed to relearn the small permissions of being alive: to walk without hurry, to sit without having to accomplish anything, to look at autumn trees and simply look at them. Healing came quietly, almost imperceptibly, through the accumulation of ordinary mercies. I was beginning to discover that sometimes God heals us not by answering the questions that torment us, but by giving us back the capacity to notice the world.

It was during those solitary wanderings through bookstores that I first encountered Mary Oliver's *Wild Geese*. I remember the strange immediacy of it. There are sentences one reads and understands; there are others that seem to read us back. Hers belonged to the latter kind. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on...” The words seemed almost embarrassingly simple. Yet something in their simplicity slipped past the defenses I had built around myself. I felt a tingling sensation begin somewhere deep in my stomach that Thursday afternoon, as though some forgotten part of me had suddenly been called by name.

What moved me was not merely that Oliver knew something about despair. It was that she refused to let despair have the last word. She placed human sorrow inside the larger breathing world: the grass, the rain, the wild geese flying home, the fields opening themselves to the sky. There was no denial of pain, no sentimental insistence that everything would be fine. Instead, there was an invitation to look again. The world goes on. The geese cry out. The sun rises. The grass does not ask whether we deserve another morning. It simply grows.

I bought my first collection of her poems that day.

I have been returning to her ever since.

I became, rather happily, an evangelist for Mary Oliver. I shared her poems with friends, posted them on Facebook, quoted her whenever I could. I wanted other people to experience what I had experienced: that peculiar sensation of discovering that someone had found language for something you had felt but could never quite say. Her poems seemed to open little windows in rooms I had forgotten were there.

But what drew me back was more than literary admiration. Oliver taught me to pay attention.

She made the commonplace difficult to overlook. A pond was no longer merely a pond. A grasshopper could become a small theological event. A morning could be received as gift rather than background. The ordinary world, which I had been walking through all my life, began to appear strange and luminous. I found myself looking more carefully: at leaves trembling in the wind, at the architecture of clouds, at birds perched on telephone wires, at the brief gold of late afternoon. It was as though the world had not changed, but my eyes had.

And perhaps this is where Oliver's poetry became, for me, unexpectedly spiritual.

She had an extraordinary ability to turn attention into meditation. Her poems did not preach at me. They invited me to kneel before the mystery of things. They taught me that wonder is not childishness but a form of wisdom, and that attentiveness can itself become a kind of prayer. To pay attention to the world is to resist the tyranny of hurry. To notice a flower is to confess, however quietly, that the flower matters. To stand before creation with astonishment is to begin again the ancient practice of gratitude.

My prayer life deepened in the wake of that awakening. I began to see more clearly that prayer is not always a matter of saying more words. Sometimes it is learning how to see. Sometimes prayer is the long afternoon walk. Sometimes it is stopping beside a tree. Sometimes it is watching the light move across a wall and realizing, suddenly, that you have been given another day.

Her poetry awakened something in my relationship with the One who made the mornings.

The God I had known in books and doctrines and theological propositions seemed suddenly nearer in the breathing world. The morning was no longer merely the beginning of another day; it was an invitation. Creation became less like scenery and more like sacrament—not because the things of the world were themselves God, but because they could become windows through which the presence and generosity of God might be glimpsed.

I began to understand that wonder is one of the ways the soul remembers God.

Oliver also taught me something about restraint. I have spent much of my life among words. I teach them, write them, preach them, arrange them into arguments and sermons and paragraphs. I have often believed that if something matters, it ought to be explained. Mary Oliver quietly unsettled that conviction. She seemed to know that there are mysteries that become smaller when overexplained.

So I learned, slowly, to temper my verbosity with her simplicity.

She reminded me that a poem does not have to shout to be profound. A sentence can be small enough to fit in the hand and still carry the weight of a life. A few well-chosen words can sometimes take us farther than a thousand clever ones. In her presence, I became suspicious of my own need to say everything.

And somewhere along the way, I learned how to be a child again.

To be a child is to be astonished by what adults have learned to overlook. A puddle is a world. A moth is a marvel. Rain is an event. A bird is not simply a bird but something astonishing that has somehow been permitted to fly. Oliver returned me to that kind of seeing. She made me less certain and more attentive, less eager to explain and more willing to wonder.

Perhaps that is why I keep going back to her.

We read certain writers because they entertain us, others because they teach us, and a rare few because they accompany us. Mary Oliver became, for me, one of those companions. I encountered her at a particular threshold in my life, when something in me was broken but beginning to mend. Her words met me there—not with answers, but with attention; not with solutions, but with wonder; not by telling me to forget my sorrow, but by reminding me that sorrow exists within a world still capable of beauty.

Years have passed since that Thursday afternoon in Pasadena. The person who first opened *Wild Geese* in a bookstore is no longer quite the person I am. But I remain grateful for that wounded man, wandering quietly among books, not knowing that he was about to find a poet who would teach him how to look again.

There are books that we read.

And then there are books that, in some mysterious way, read us.

Mary Oliver's were among the latter.

Thank you, Mary Oliver, for reminding me that the world is still going on; that there are geese overhead, grass beneath our feet, mornings waiting to be noticed, and beauty hiding in plain sight. Thank you for teaching me that paying attention can be an act of faith, that wonder can be a form of prayer, and that sometimes the way back to the soul begins simply by looking carefully at what has been there all along.

Thank you for helping me see the world again.