Mary Oliver’s Query
[“And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—your life—what would do for you?” (Mary Oliver, “To Begin with, the Sweet Grass,” Devotions, 78)]
O Lover,
The question “is this all there is to life?” has sundry and varied authors. The raising of this query seems to connote any or all of a range of preconditions: discontent with what is perceived; a scarcity of goodies (however defined) and thus unmet criteria; an abacus of sorts so as to render a decision; the húbris that the ego stands in judgment of everything. It is a question intimating desperation more than celebration, one generally raised amid myopic fixation on the difficulties of this or that rather than some larger perspective. While it seems here that the question is more widespread among the young, I can testify to sightings in both halves of life.
For myself, I find the question “is this all there is to life?” countered by that of Oliver: “And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—your life—what would do for you?” Her offering opens a raft of derivative queries: What have I been looking at yet failing to see? Have I been perceiving surfaces more than gazing down into a translucency beneath and beyond objects, events, and issues? Have I fetishized utility, monetizing, and consumption to the neglect of the healing reaches of beauty, love, and wonder? Do I practice disciplines disposing me to receptivity to the gift of awe? Have I neglected awareness that the principal identity of the cosmos, particularly this bleeding planet, is that it has never been unvisited, and that somehow, sometime, someway vastly beyond my understanding all will, nevertheless, be well?
As the eyes of our hearts are being opened Oliver’s use of “enchanted” seems especially well-chosen: the ubiquitous interconnectedness of everything, especially the animates; the reverse-gravity of art forms like music unaccountable by empirical or materialist reductions; the heart’s language of love so violative of the cubicles and boundaries of reason; the jaw-dropping miracle that there is something rather than nothing; the sheer splendor, the sheen, of the gift of being itself.
And then, enveloping and infusing all of the above, You, O Lover. Had I never experienced more than the totality of the finitisphere from the quark to the universe (multiverse?), would I have deemed my life “sufficient”? Or would I have cried out, as did Jessica Powers, that even everything “was not enough” (SPJP,133)? For me the latter queries are finally hypothetical, for, whether as presence or absence, peace or conundrum, You have never not been “brooding upon the face of [my] waters” (Gen 1:2). Indeed, I have simply given up ever extricating myself from You, You who “hem me in behind and before” (Ps 139:7-12), You Francis Thompson’s indefatigable ”Hound.” Somewhere in the backstretch of life I hoisted a white flag conceding that however my life would unfold, it would be within, rather than without, You. So, yes, whether I experience what is as enchanted or loathsome, it is the embraced-by-You-universe. A cosmos uninhabited, unpervaded, undepthed, undrawn, is a mere abstraction, an oxymoronic surd.
Back then to Oliver’s question: is this “package” which is, O Embracer/embracee, enough for me? The answer here is in the affirmative, albeit my awareness of that clarity uneven. Sometimes I find myself sleepwalking, all of the enchantment notwithstanding, but then, seemingly in Your good time, Your stealthful stalking brings me to ground yet again. The thing is, I am becoming more rusting of Your inimitable M.O., perhaps my clearest response to Mary Oliver’s question.
