the deepening ground

I have been living, savoring the moments of married children home for weddings, holiday celebrations, late night games and talks, traveling and staying put, eating, loving, caring for the sick, pushing off the extraneous, the many emails pilling up like leaves in my inbox, and fronting “only the essential facts of life,” as Thoreau so beautifully put it. I have not made time to be creative, however. And I’m okay with that. But coming across this poem by Mary Oliver today, I am inspired “to think again of dangerous and noble things…” especially in the lifeless face of artificial intelligence. Here’s to a new year of fresh creatively, original thought, and firm foundations in the living past!

Starlings in Winter by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

“Starlings in Winter” by Mary Oliver from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays, Beacon Press; First Edition (April 1, 2006): pg. 56.