It is no small thing, to start a morning with Mary Oliver’s words. With coffee in a mug that I love, in a calm and cozy house, while outside a storm pours and pours.
I glance up at my bookshelves, grateful for all the words that they contain. A book about creativity; a book about grief; a book about the dust bowl; a book about the redwoods.
I have a friend who beautifully organizes her books by colors. The effect is so pleasing: this rainbow that progresses is an invitation to explore. My bookshelves are nothing like that. They are not organized by topic, color, size. Fiction next to non-fiction; travel books aside poetry. There is one shelf that attempted to be exclusive, and is about half John Steinbeck, but its boundaries have been breached. Now, there is a book about houseplants on there; a small dictionary of Portuguese has sneaked in.
Lately I have been looking at my books, thinking about what to do with them all. They are a security blanket; I partially believe I am collecting words to entertain me, should there ever be a time when words stop being so widely available. Sometimes I read something and think to myself, I could do that. And then sometimes I think to myself, there’s no way I could do that. I will take it, the hand-holding of the achievable and the impossible.
Mary Oliver: Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the world of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
It is good instruction. Today I will try to do that, teach my child and myself. Stand in the puddles, crouch down to see eye-to-eye with the mysterious and the miraculous, which surrounds us. Which is everywhere.
It is no small thing, to start a morning here.
The Wandering Introvert 