This week I got to see and hear Mary Oliver read from her work at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.  It’s amazing to go to a huge concert hall and to look back, around, and up and to see every seat filled with audience members coming to feast on the beauty of words.  It was a huge treat for me, after all these years of admiring her from afar, to actually be in the same room with and listen to Mary Oliver read from her work.  She’s lovely.  Fiesty, sharp, witty, warm and profoundly deep, at 73.  She walked on stage with a pair of black jeans and a black pull over sweater.  And she read from her work and regaled us with her presence for an hour and a half.

The message I took from this evening’s reading of her poems was the importance of paying attention.  Like in her poem, Summer Day, when shes says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is, but I do know how to pay attention.”  Paying attention, easy to say, difficult to do in our world of abundant distractions.  Yet, paying attention is the source of Mary Oliver’s poetry, the source for her soul.  She sits still and watches swans for days until she understands their transcendent message which she pens into a poem.

How do we practice paying attention in our everyday lives–how the coffee smells in the morning, the first sounds when we awake, the sound of the car’s motor on the way to work, the trees, buildings, fields we pass, the sound of a friend’s soul in the tone of her voice.  What new things would we know if we stayed present in the here and now, rather than be distracted by the cacaphony of modern life?  It’s a practice.  What new decisions would I make?  How might my life be different?

 

 At a recent fiftieth birthday party for a friend, one of the guests shared this photograph of our planet as seen from Saturn.  It gave me pause.  We are so puny, so tiny in the universe.  Our planet looks like a station in the outback, remote, out of reach.  And if our planet is that small, then we humans are infinitely smaller in the universe.  Hard for us earthlings to imagine how insignificant we are in size when compared to the size of the universe.  We take ourselves so seriously most of the time. 

The perspective this photograph offers humbles me.  Yet, I affirm that our existence does matter.  It matters how we live each of our nanosecond long lives.  It  matters that we give it our best shot, that we leave our miniscule area of this universe a bit better than we found it.  That we clean up after ourselves. 

It’s when I listen to the evening news on the radio that I keep this image of the earth viewed from Saturn in my mind.  It helps me put all that information in perspective: the political scandals, the heads of state traveling here and there, the stock market going up or down.  In the end what really matters? 

If I were standing on the rings of Saturn, I would look at this blue planet called earth and I wouldn’t hear all the noise, I would only see its blue hue offering me hope, curiousity, and goodwill–an invitation.  I would wonder if there was life on this planet and how this life interacted.  Were they kind to their young, were they loving or were they violent, were they respectful to the planet that nurtured them with life?  This is what I would wonder.  How about you?  What matters then?

For a better look at this photo go to this New York Times article.