I just got back from seeing the Mary Oliver documentary (at the Pickford, of course! Bellingham’s gem indie theater) and wrote this little poem: 

Mary Oliver Documentary Review 

If she were alive,
she’d never have consented
to a documentary about her small, giant life.
There’s so little footage of her
that the filmmaker is forced to use
generic shots of animals,
which Mary would have loved.
Show the foxes, dogs, gulls, and geese!
Keep panning back to 
Blackwater Pond, the scene 
of all the action—
beech, pitch pine, birch,
honeysuckle, ferns,
warblers, painted turtles, grey squirrels.
I have a feeling she would say,
“Notice them, not me.”
And probably, “There is nothing 
more interesting about my life
than your own.” Indeed,
this is why we love her so. 

I wrote a few weeks ago about finding your own beach and my reflections after my pilgrimage to Provincetown. And after my quiet trip to France, being off social media for a month, and more nature reading, I’m hypersensitive at the moment to anyone trying to sell me anything, anyone hawking the cults of beauty, thinness, or youth, and almost any promotion whatsoever!  

 Mary models something different. She wrote poetry every day, lived on next to nothing, and was under-the-radar, simply working and noticing, until she won the Pulitzer for her poetry collection American Primitive at age 48.  Even then, she just kept on working and it wasn’t until her partner Molly Malone Cook died that she made the choice to open herself to the wider world. That’s when I saw her at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, a night I will never forget. 

I know we cannot transport ourselves back to 1984 when people actually read books and weren’t addicted to mind-addling devices and longevity gurus. But I sure as hell am going to keep trying to pay attention to my own life and to the natural world. I am going to keep making things instead of consuming things. I’m going to keep writing, struggling to find words even though there are machines that want to give them to me. I’m going to cherish the Douglas Firs and Black Cottonwoods, seastars, and Pigeon Guillemots.  

One of the most moving parts of the documentary was people simply reading Mary’s poems. Steven Colbert couldn’t make it through one without crying. I can relate. I’ll leave you with a few lines from her poem Landscape: 

Every morning I walk like this
around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead. 

May the doors of your heart be open! Thank you for reading.