Mary Oliver
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Missing in action. That’s how I’ve felt, creatively (and emotionally), for the past two months. Little time to pay attention. Little time to be astonished. Little time to tell about it. I’ve failed to live by Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life. Fall has always been a season brimming with activity: school starts, I
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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
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Having not posted anything by Mary Oliver in awhile, I wondered if she had any poetry related to Independence Day. A quick online search led me to a post on “Improvised Life: A Treasury of Inspiring Ideas.” Allegedly, a poem my wife has loved for years, first read in Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early,
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The fragility of life surrounds us. It’s easy to numb ourselves to it or be inoculated by fleeting pleasures. But the reality of death remains. Does that mean I spend all my time living in despair, fearing the quiet feet of death? Of course not. Life is beautiful and just being in nature is enough
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We interrupt this pizza night to bring you a special guest: a Cooper’s Hawk. Admittedly, I’m not 100% sure that our visitor was a Cooper’s Hawk. My fellow writer and friend James and I spent part of our most recent Dunkin’ Drafting evening searching allaboutbirds.org trying to identify our hawk from the less than stellar
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Saturday afternoon, my youngest son and I were preparing to powerwash our porch furniture before dressing them in a fresh coat of Hunter Green paint. As I struggled to remove the nozzle from the hose, two moles popped out of the ground at the top of the stone steps, squeaking and tussling for a brief
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There’s something that draws me to hawks. And yet, this morning a hawk was drawn to our side porch! Admittedly, I know exactly why the hawk chose to hang out on the corner post overlooking my neighbor’s lawn: baby rabbits. We’d been watching their furtive movements around the rhododendron bush from the dining room table
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For Father’s Day, my daughter went hunting for hawks among the poetry of Mary Oliver. (She knows my affinity for those majestic birds of prey.) Instead, she found the wonder of the spoken word in the poem below. Somehow I read past this piece in my collection of Oliver’s poems without marking it with a
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I would have loved to share the thirty second clip I took of Wolf Creek panning from the dam in the image above down through the smaller dams my sons and I created, on to the waters that slow as they pass the tire swing so you could more fully experience the sight and soundscape
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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
the deepening ground 