I was all excited this afternoon when I checked my email to see that two people I don’t know are following me.  I clicked on their blog links…and they’re both selling things.  Welcome to the consumertastic world, right?  Oh, well.

I’ve been reading  a lot of Mary Oliver’s poetry lately.  Her poem “The Summer Day” inspired my most recent tattoo, and there is something about her precise use of words as she lets us in to see what she has been observing that is right where I need to be.  I read “Whelks” the other night, and cried, and had to read it again four times.  Here’s a link to another blogger who has posted it.  http://beautyfromchaos.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/whelks/  (The line that has the word “shanking” should be read “shaking.”)

The lines that walloped me are:

All my life
I have been restless –
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss –
than wholeness –
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.

I have, at various times in my life, felt this…urgency.  This need to be doing something different from what I am doing.  Sometimes it was related to my love life, sometimes to my career, and sometimes to…well, “I have not been sure what it is.”  The love life part of the equation went away when my husband and I connected, but the others have never disappeared.  They diminish and surge, but are never truly gone.  And I have always wondered, “What’s wrong with me?”  While it’s perfectly human to want, I’ve often thought, “Greedy girl–you have a great life.  Why can’t you be happy and content?”

And now I know that I’m not alone.

Mary Oliver Teaches Me to See

I watched the wind today

     blowing the browned and crunchy leaves,

          sending winter’s refuse skittering.

Trees’ bare branches shook,

     clicked and clattered against each other,

         squirrels tightrope-walked, no nets.

Spring is coming on

     in soft red streamers of maple leaves

         and sun-bursts of forsythia.