Tag: Mary Oliver

Why worry

I worry a lot. When will the drought end. Will the future hold. Her pregnancy go to term. Horrors come in cycles. One fear eclipses another and then it recycles back into causes for optimism though the man on the radio last night said we have only till 2050 to get ourselves back on track before it’s too late for the world.

Too late for future generations. He used the word subsist. He was not suggesting a lush and lovely life but subsistence, survival and perhaps it’s as much as we can hope for.

The dogs are here over night for a visit, the small brown and white Jack Russell, all feisty bark and bravado while the large hairy labradoodle, all anxiety and fear, sits behind me.   The dogs are a comfort, a reminder of what it’s like to care for children.

I’m reading Kate Hamilton’s Mad Wife, and troubled by the extent of her efforts to save her failing marriage by getting into the swinging scene. The stuff of wife swapping and sexual hedonism. 

Anything excessive in the sexual realm troubles me. I recognise my inhibitions given my childhood fears of my father’s excess. My fears I could go mad under the weight of such heady bodily impulses.

I worry about the cracks in the walls of this over one-hundred-years old house, my lack of desire to plaster over them yet again. My acceptance that soon enough the house will be pulled down to make way for multiple apartments along the busy road on which we have lived these past forty-five years. Soon fifty years. 

I worry that the clothes moths invading the carpet in places will attack my jumpers and woollen clothes just as I have needed to throw out my husband’s pullovers. His woollen hat from Scotland, his fisherman’s hat from Italy. 

My husband collects hats and walking sticks and all manner of equipment, the type needed to bake bread the make sausages and salami, the type needed to thread pasta and strain tomatoes ahead of tomato sauce, bookbinding equipment, papers and weights, the knives –  so many knives, the kitchen knives, the oaring knives which he sharpens on stones to a mirror sheen for paring leather. 

His cameras’ high quality to allow for the best photographs only these days they’re too heavy to carry far so he settles, as so many of us do, for his iPhone. He dabbles in calligraphy in art, in writing. He has put his mind to glass blowing and for many years there he produced the most glorious bowls on his lathe. There in the workshop for hour after hour, the various pieces of wood, high quality, Huen pine, camphor wood, iron bark, oak and jarrah, the heavy woods from ancient forests all bought for a price with plans one day to carve them into items of beauty. 

His prize-winning bowl sits on his shelves alongside the pieces he insists are not good enough. He is a perfectionist, a man of many talents, too many talents. He cannot choose one on which to focus, so he flits around from one to another. He has carved spoons out of wood, the hand carved variety, and collects coins. He’d collect more wine if he could, but we invariably wind up drinking it. 

I prefer this use of the objects collected to things hidden away in sock drawers near his hidden artefacts. Why have them if we cannot use them? Why preserve things for an unknown future?

When we were small my mother collected sheets and towels for her future dream home. And when we finally moved into the AV Jennings cream brick veneer in Warrigal Road Cheltenham we used them at last. Their pristine newness lasted only weeks before we kids left them stretched across bathroom floors after use, or they were stained on beds with bedwetting, periods and the other grubbiness of human endeavour that turns once white sheets into those yellowed and streaked.

Life is to be used up. But something must also be reserved. And we must hold back on our consumption ahead of his uncertain future.

I worry a lot. About the point of all the words I have written here today, and everyday whenever I take to the page with my running fingers. These words are a waste of time and energy. But then I read the poets Mary Oliver from whom I borrowed this first sentence. She of the short and pithy honesty that stays with me long after I have read. 

‘You do not have to crawl through the desert on your knees for a hundred miles repenting…’

I take solace from her words. They let me off the proverbial hook. The say, go for it. Allow yourself the indulgence of words. They are cheap. They cost very little beyond the ink and paper, if they see the light of day. Or the wear and tear of a computer screen and its inner workings.

‘Tell me,’ Mary Oliver again, ‘what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

She is gone now, leaving behind her legacy of words.

A poet after all his has refined the words to pools of meaning that stay with us in a way prose might not.

I worry a lot. About the blemish on my right hand that came out of nowhere like a strange blister that the hypochondriac in me imagines might morph into a skin cancer. 

I rehearse a visit to my GP to the skin specialist and hope in the meantime it will go away. As so many things do. Even as I read the stories and remember the words on the television when I was a girl of something like ten. 

‘A lump or thickening on the skin or elsewhere could be an early sign of cancer. Remember many early cancers can be cured.’ Or words to this effect. And in my university days when people talked about the big ‘C’, the way it invaded people’s bodies and lives.

More than this I worry for my heart. My overloaded heart. The way the worries load it down and one day, like my mother’s ahead of me, mine will wear out and I will be no more.

It’s not the being no more. It’s the getting there that worries me. The rough road of endings. 

To Catch the Moon

‘The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.’ Mary Oliver

Years ago, in a novel writing class conducted within one of the half-renovated rooms of the then Council for Adult Education in Degraves Street, Melbourne, our teacher, the late Olga Lorenzo asked, ‘What would you have people write on your gravestone? She kept a tidy house, or she wrote a good book?’ We were all in agreement, ten women – the two men less so. The alternative did not fit their expectations – the book came first. 

Mary Oliver’s words resonate here: those sad souls, the ones who neglected their creative urges, whether through fear or necessity, are now filled with regret. How many of the gazillion souls floating above the universe were unable to give expression to the creative urges that first arose in childhood with mudpie making, cubby house construction, or chalk scribbles on concrete, only to find they could not sustain their imaginations throughout the rigours of daily life? 

Some tried to turn to it in their twilight years when the burdens of family and work had shifted, but all too late. Their joints were rusty, their thought patterns sluggish and the whimsy of childhood was over. How much can we ascribe these failures to address our creative energies throughout our lives to the critic within?

Patricia Hampl tells the story of travelling in a crowded bus when she heard a woman’s voice spill over the crowd: ‘I could tell you stories.’ She was filled with the urgency of wanting to let others know about a world unknown to them.

In Hampl’s mind, however admirable the oral tradition, the sharing of stories by word of mouth, is different from putting words on the page. The impulse to write has a distinct energy. It requires different parts of our brain, the opposite to that part we use to form judgments. Which is why when we write, we must not listen to the critical voice which tells us repeatedly: This is crap. This is boring. And asks questions. Who would want to read this? 

Then insists, There’s nothing new here. It’s already been said. It’s too wordy. Too vacuous, too full of fluff. 

The writer might stop in their tracks, then. Or decide not to begin in the first place.

When I settled down to write this morning I had no idea where it might take me. It is one of those days when I’m under pressure. To prepare for a family birthday breakfast. To tidy my kitchen. Forgive me, Olga Lorenzo, whose gravestone most clearly does not include the words: she kept a tidy house, and she certainly wrote more than one good book. 

Olga, my dear writing teacher of many years ago had a habit when she took us for lessons on how to deal with dialogue, how to workshop writing, how to get to the heart of a story. She described arguing with her husband as they walked along the sand on the beach near her home. She piled on detail after detail: the bad sex, the uneven parenting and housework, the money worries, the usual stress of many a mid-ranking couple in Melbourne, Australia during the early 1990s, when one of our class members piped up: 

‘Too much information, Olga.’ 

We tittered, but Olga was undeterred. Just as I remain convinced the information and detail of our daily lives, as prosaic as it might seem to some, is the stuff of the stories we tell.

So the writer’s voice can turn the repetitive and daily dross of life into something wondrous. The lambchopdom, as the writer Gillian Mears once described her life when constrained by home and family, is still the background to our lives, whether in a grass hut, a tree top shanty or a palatial palace. The ‘little boxes’ of Pete Seeger’s suburban landscape, ‘all made out of ticky tacky’ and all looking just the same, comprise a million variations in the unique interior housed by the many different people who go through the front door each night and leave in the morning. 

The uniqueness of the individual, of their internal worlds, of their thoughts and feelings, the experiences that make them tick. The stereotypical shells they occupy, whether white skinned or black, bodies whose shape and function fits the ideal or is misshapen, too big or too small, too acne scarred or with perfect alabaster skin that can only crease over time. All these elements comprise the outer skin that encases the inner workings of each one of us. 

The writer’s task is to get to the heart of story, which I have failed to do here, on my soap box of memory and understanding, but I shall now tell you the story of a small boy who sat with me the other day and looked upwards towards the soon-to-be night sky. 

‘Look at the moon,’ he said, and above I saw a sliver of white. 

The boy reached up his hand. ‘I want to catch the moon,’ he said his arm flailing. ‘Why can’t I get it?’ He swiped again and again. 

‘It’s too far away,’ I said, as if this explanation alone might suffice. 

Still the boy was determined to drag down the moon. He whipped a curved soup ladle from the contents of his child size kitchen and swung upwards. 

‘Even if it crashes down and smashes us to smithereens?’ I asked. 

In this place of imagination and unreality lies the source of our creativity.

The boy did not stop trying until his mother called him inside for dinner and bed. Still resolute, one day he’d catch the moon.