the deepening ground

I’ve come back to Mary Oliver after she popped up in the book I’m reading for enjoyment between preparing for school and repairing our fleet of cars! The book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (I know: enjoyment?), and Mary Oliver shows up on page 104. Of course, this sent me searching for the full context which happens to be from a collection of essays titled Upstream. Specifically, the selection below comes from “Of Power and Time.”

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.

Mary Oliver, from the final paragraph of “Of Power and Time”

As a creative writer whose creative powers have languished in a season that should offer more leisure and opportunity to write (summer), her words pierced to the heart of the modern conundrum. However, I have not frittered my time away with binging shows on Netflix, nor have I been locked in a doom scroll on social media. In fact, I spent the last two weeks soaking up every moment I could with my two grandsons (one visiting from South Carolina), and even put together a family gig at our local coffee shop. Still, these words come as a timely reminder as the school year looms with all of its busyness. Beware the intimate interrupters!

from “Of Power and Time”
by mary oliver

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart-a pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And What does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.

It is this internal force - this intimate interrupter - whose tracks I would follow. The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self - and does - is a darker and more curious matter.

From Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver, 2016: pgs. 23-32.