How a Mary Oliver Poem Helped Me Rethink Paying Attention

Mary Oliver’s Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Dear Vi,

Some time ago I came upon this poem by Mary Oliver and it struck me, it really struck me, that this is not something that is part of our world anymore. Paying attention, I mean. Being astonished by the little things that we notice. Talking about them.

(And by “our” I mean the modern world that we are alive in right now. Although I suspect that our parents didn’t live in a world where this was true, either.)

(And by “world” I mean (unfortunately, and shame on me) the western world, because that is the world I know and the only one I feel even slightly competent to speak for. (Thus the “shame on me” comment.))  

Anyway, intrigued, I went downtown to Mac’s Fireweed Books in search for a copy, because Mary’s instructions for living a life struck such a chord in me and I wanted to read more of her thoughts.  When I got home, the first thing I did was to sit down at the kitchen table and look this poem up, and here is something that astonished me: this is not the complete poem! It is actually the seventh section of her much longer poem called, “Sometimes,” and if you want to read it, it starts on page 104 in Devotions, the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver.

Here is what I think: I think that the fact that these instructions have been dissected from the larger work makes my argument for me. We take what little bits and pieces suit us and throw the rest away. In fact, sometimes we throw them so far away from us that we’re astonished to discover they ever existed in the first place. We aren’t interested in the rest of the poem because it takes some considering and some parsing and some contemplating and some effort…and that’s not something we do anymore.

And by “we” I mean society in general.

And by “we” I mean me in particular…though I’m trying to change that.

It takes work to read a poem, sometimes, don’t you think? And I believe that part of losing our ability to truly pay attention is the loss of the patience it takes to sit with a curious thing and consider it.

And when we no longer have the patience to sit and ponder for a thing for however long it takes to form an opinion or be affected by it, that thing loses its value.

What I mean is it becomes disposable.

And this is a conundrum, isn’t it. Because if somebody hadn’t been so struck by the seventh part of the poem called “Sometimes” that they cut it out of the larger poem and shared it, I might never have heard of it.

And if I had never heard of it, I wouldn’t have been struck by it enough to drive into town in search of it.

Maybe that’s what she meant when she wrote those instructions in the first place.

Pay Attention.
Be Astonished.
Tell About It.

I hope Mary would feel some delight that her words sent me on this thought adventure. What about you?