Be astonished
Instructions for living a life from "Sometimes," by Mary Oliver:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Hiking a section of the Ridgeline Trail yesterday, I saw a man coming toward me up one of the switchbacks. It was a crisp morning. It had rained the day before, and the forest was intensely, blindingly green; the air, heavenly. (FYI, petrichor is the descriptive word for that scent.) The birds were not “chirping” or “tweeting.” They were singing songs. As the man approached, I saw that he was staring at his phone. The path is narrow. He would have run into me had I not said “good morning.” He looked up briefly, looked down, continued on.
Be astonished. Every day, I mean every day--I am not exaggerating for literary purposes here—when I drive down the hill into town, I look to my right and see the Three Sisters, part of the Cascade mountain range. More likely during five months of the year, I see a soft landscape of flannely fog or a thick gray layer of sodden clouds that obscure the mountains I know are there. A half-mile later, I look to my left over a deep valley, and I see the smaller peaks of the coastal range. Or flannely fog or thick gray clouds. And I think: I see beauty every day that some people never see. I see beauty I never imagined growing up in a raw suburb carved out of erstwhile potato fields. (My mother dubbed our home “sheetrock rambles, PotatoFields, USA.”) And I say, generally out loud, because I talk out loud to myself in the car: I will never take this for granted.
Tell about it. Um, yes. Here I am.
I read Mary Oliver's “Sometimes” sitting on a rock on the banks of the Umpqua last week. The river is so clear you can see the rocks beneath the surface. On my side of the river, the forest is lush with Doug fir, hemlock, incense cedar. On the other side, the Archie Creek Fire of 2020, which hopscotched the land and burned more than 130,000 acres, reduced the forest to blackened spears, an otherworldly landscape that has a chilling beauty to it. You can hear the river. There are rapids just a hundred yards away. I sat there for a good, long while. Emphasis on the good. And I also read this poem:
“We Shake with Joy,” Mary Oliver
We shake with joy, we shake with grief
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.