Mary Oliver — who died in 2019 after a lifetime of extraordinary poetry — was not a Buddhist, not a Sufi, not formally affiliated with any contemplative tradition. She was a poet who spent her mornings walking through the woods and marshes of Cape Cod and Massachusetts with a notebook, paying attention to what she found there with a quality of focused, loving, unhurried attention that most people never bring to anything.
And in that attention — that patient, open, wonder-filled attention to the world exactly as it is — she produced poetry that has done what all great spiritual literature does: it cracks something open in the reader. It creates, in the space of a few lines, the direct encounter with aliveness, with wonder, with the irreplaceable preciousness of being here that is the point of every contemplative practice ever developed.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
These two lines — from the closing of her poem 'The Summer Day' — are among the most widely shared lines of poetry in the English language. And their power comes from their precision: they do not ask what you plan to achieve, or accumulate, or prove. They ask what you plan to do with it. With the wild and precious fact of being alive, right now, in this body, on this earth, in this moment that will not come again.
Mary Oliver said: 'Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.' In eight words she described a complete contemplative practice. The paying attention is the meditation. The astonishment is the fruit — the opening of the heart that genuine presence produces. The telling about it is the practice of sharing what has been given, of transmitting the recognition to others who need it.
She wrote about grasshoppers and herons and black bears and the simple act of lying in a field. And in each of these ordinary encounters, mediated by her extraordinary quality of attention, something universal was revealed. The grasshopper who 'flung herself out of the grass' and looked around 'with her enormous and complicated eyes' — in Oliver's poem, that grasshopper is a door into the recognition of what all life is: startling, impermanent, unrepeatable, complete.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
— Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
These lines carry a teaching that could take years of contemplative practice to arrive at intellectually. The soft animal of the body knows things the mind does not. And the path back to genuine aliveness is not through more effort, more achievement, more spiritual performance. It is through the willingness to let the body be what it is and love what it loves. That is enough. That has always been enough.
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