I’m on a long-awaited pilgrimage to Provincetown, Massachusetts this week. My aunt has been visiting, working, or seasonally living here for 50 years, and for the last decade has been living in a condo that she purchased from the poet Mary Oliver. She’s listing it, and I have finally come to say hello and goodbye in the same trip. I’m soaking up time with my aunt, swimming in the bay, and walking the same beach that Mary and her dogs walked for many years. When I graduated from high school in 1992, my English teacher Mr. Dolmatz gave me the newly released hardbound edition of Mary’s new and selected poems. It was the first volume of poetry I owned, though I’d been writing poems since second grade. That gift began a lifelong love affair with modern poetry, especially poetry written in Mary’s plainspoken style, and it’s a deep connection my aunt and I share.
I took some time this morning to sit near the beach, read Mary’s poetry, and write a little bit of my own. I wrote:
Here, where Mary Oliver
and dog Percy
walked, wondered, and played,
I can hear her message to me—
find your own beach
and love every inch of it.
Mary intimately knew this stretch of beach and the nearby dunes and ponds. No detail was too small to escape her notice, and she admonishes us in her poem “Sometimes” to “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Millions of people credit Mary Oliver with helping them pay more attention to their own life and surroundings, repeating Mary’s question from her poem “A Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Against the backdrop of Cape Cod’s beauty, it’s tempting to think, “Well, easy for Mary to say. She lived on the beach and had the luxury of writing poetry about it for a living.” We know, however, that she had a horrific childhood, and that she could have easily been subsumed by self-pity and darkness. And in her earlier poems, it’s easy to see her teetering on that edge. If you keep reading, you see that she was saved by noticing.
All of us live in some kind of context. We all have countless people, creatures, and places begging to be seen. I immediately think of the big Black Cottonwood on the Klipsun trail near my house. And, of course, I think of “my” beach, Marine Park in Bellingham, Washington, where I swim early Sunday mornings. I drape my towel over the same log, I see herons perching on the rocks, I see the same patch of sea turn millions of shades of blue and green.
Others are lawyers, activists, social workers, scientists, athletes, architects. They live in big cities, in the mountains, on an island, on a farm. I’m a 50-year-old woman who lives in a mid-size college town by the Salish Sea and I help leaders and organizations serve with joy and integrity. That’s my metaphorical beach. And I’ve got real ones, too. Patches of earth, stretches of sea, intertidal zones, ancient sacred places that, despite our greed and neglect, are still teeming with life. I can hear Mary saying to me, to us, “Find your beach. Know it intimately. Love it well. The only life you have is your own.” May it be so.