We reached a record cold temperature early, early Thursday morning in Denver. If you’re going to be really hot or really cold, might as well break a record, I suppose. Ours was -7 degrees, the coldest March 10 you can find.
March is the month when it’s supposed to be summer in the sun and winter in the shade (Dickens). But for sure, we were just winter this week. All winter. Arctic winter. And while on Thursday we quadrupled that early morning temperature by the end of the day (low 20s!), cold is cold. I took a load of warm towels out of the dryer and there was a wave of warmth and fabric softener that spilled out with them. It gave me one of those moments of grateful clarity where you realize just how much you have, and that brief staggering recognition that threatens to overwhelm you as you stand with an armful of laundry in front of the dryer.
What’s wrong?, someone might ask you in that moment if they saw the quick pause, maybe a hitched breath held in surprise. And the answer would be nothing. The moment is so right in its tiny significant inconsequence as to take your breath away, or else consumed and forgotten in the noise of the day. It is a tiny pinpoint of stars on a dark night or a dandelion growing through the pavement. Everything and nothing.
Mary Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet known for her poems chronicling her awe of the world around her. She saw magic in a blade of grass, in geese as they made their way on their annual migration (check out The Summer Day or Wild Geese). She is a beautiful writer.
And she is absolutely brutal.
“Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” she asks.
And then, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
What do I plan to do? Plan to be? I think I knew best who I thought I was when I was probably about 20. A lot has gone down since then. Now? Not so much.
Sometimes when I read Mary Oliver, I feel inspired to take more deep breaths and take more time. To be more present. Sometimes I want to promise to do more. Sometimes to do less, but with intention. Sometimes I feel attacked, guilty for not even being able to remember if I closed the garage door – so focused on the next thing, or not focused at all.
It’s so hard to be in the moment that we download apps on our glowing blue light phones for mindful meditation, reminders to be grateful, alarms to Slow Down or Breathe. Mary Oliver would laugh wryly at our insistence upon mindful technology. Or maybe she would just turn away, sink down into a meadow, and leave us to ourselves. But even in our haste and inattention, sometimes the world around us insists that we take notice.
On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. And on February 26, one of my high school classmates, Eric Grove, died at age 43. The invasion of Ukraine was more expected than my classmate’s death, though both are depressing. Eric was affectionally known as a “big guy with a big heart,” and he was both. A cornerstone of my small Ohio hometown, no one considered that he might not be around for the next football season of the high school he loved so much, or to advise the college students he was a friend and mentor to in his admissions job. He and I were friendly, though never particularly close. But I graduated in a class of only 97 students, and he went to my childhood church (his then and current church where he ran the sound system every Sunday til this day). I knew his history and his family and his friends. Facebook kept us up to date. When he died, there was an outpouring of grief from my hometown. It was a tribute to how much he was loved.
And I realized – this is the point. Using our one wild and precious life to its fullest doesn’t mean that we get up everyone morning and change the world. But it means that the world is changed for the better because we’ve been in it. Eric Grove understood this.
Eric’s was a gentle existence. The invasion of Ukraine is anything but. But in both cases, it brings into such stark relief how much we take for granted the quiet piling up of seemingly unremarkable days. I imagine an old woman, stacking pearls into a pile, a pearl for each day, amounting to years, carefully constructed into a just-stable collection. And then, an earthquake; then an avalanche. Pearls spilling, tumbling, smooth and slick and spinning into chaos. And as we scramble after each one, we realize that not one of them was unremarkable. Each is priceless and part of the whole.
Watching the news for 45 seconds of “highlights” will break your heart right now. It seems it has been that way for a while. Maybe for as long as there has been headline news. We feel powerless to FIX all the things that are broken. We watch the vulnerable and we feel vulnerable ourselves, but also guilty for having a dryer full of warm, soft towels. We’re angry that life is so unjust, and that so many people are gone too soon. We’re anguished that people, children even, are confused and frightened, afraid or in pain before they go. And we’re awestruck at the bravery of people who had work-a-day jobs just like ours, whose children refused to eat certain colors, whose dishwashers sprung leaks at inconvenient times, who rushed from work to orthodontist appointments to middle school band concerts – and who now form an army of peerless civilians.
Can any of us imagine our skies opening above us and raining down destruction? Can we imagine putting our loved ones into a mass grave, hurriedly, because we might be next, even as we bury our hearts? Even as I see it broadcast right into my living room, I can’t quite imagine living it.
Life is heavy. It feels like mid-winter when we we’ve been hoping for so long for spring. COVID cases going down? Can I introduce you to the possibility of nuclear world war? Or perhaps just rife civil discord in your own country that makes you grit your teeth as you bite your tongue so as not to lose friends, because life is too short?
Sometimes it feels almost disloyal to the horrible madness to laugh. Can we laugh into the anarchy? Does that make us mad ourselves? Or callously blasé? Or just … still alive? Our hearts are bruised and fractured, injured by a thousand small cuts and a few not-quite-mortal wounds, pressed to near-smothered by Putin’s horrific war crimes, by our friends’ and families’ grief, by our own ineffectiveness in shouting into the void for all the losses great and small.
But I have to think that we’re not defeated until we no longer watch the wild geese as they fly overhead, no longer feel the small wonder of a load of warm, fresh towels, until our admiration of others’ lives no longer prompts us to want to live our own… better.
Perhaps all we can really do, perhaps the very most we can promise to do with our one wild and precious life, is – as Mary Oliver said – just to pay attention. To let our hearts fill and let them break. Again and again.
