I don’t know exactly what a prayer is – Mary Oliver

According to William James Desmond, the Irish Philosopher, the world is full of wonder, abundance and worth. In our podcast, we talked about his approach to being and life, so I read more about him. A few days earlier, a dear friend had introduced me to the American poet Mary Oliver – and I was fascinated how well these poems express various aspects of Desmonds´ work. Therefore we choose three poems by Mary Oliver, first: Perhaps the most famous one with the well known lines: tell me what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? (also the title of an anthology from 2024, see below).

Like in William Desmond’s philosophy, Mary Olivers´ poems express wonder. “Wonder at the aesthetic richness of the world, at our own mysterious depths, at the strangeness of there being anything at all”, as Steven Knepper writes about Desmond. Being is excessive, “overdetermined“, a concept we’ll return to later. “Life is more than we can take in. Being manifests a worth that we did not put there, a worth that can move us to care” – and this is also what Mary Olivers expresses.

The summer day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver invites us to reflect on what we are doing with our lives, whether we can still access awe and wonder in the face of the world’s abundance and mystery. Of course, in these troubled times, it may seem strange to feel “idle and blessed,” but it may be all the more important to understand the limitations of our everyday self-centered thinking and to reconnect with the wonders of the world – which is also expressed in the next poem.

I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

The third poem exemplifies something that also Desmond decribes: A pervasive modern sense in our society, that being is a resource, of use value, so that other values become secondary or subjective. Desmond calls this the “ethos of serviceable disposability,” wherein “things must be serviceable for us, but once they have served their use, they are disposable.” He notes that “persons too are often treated as items of serviceable disposability. We can only treat being as neutral if we abstract it from this primordial experience. Such abstraction involves a dubious subject-object dualism, one untrue to our constitutive receptivity. We are not self-contained subjects sealed off from the world “out there.” We internalize, and we are drawn out of ourselves. We are, as Desmond says, “porous.” (Quotes by Steven Knepper)

Desmond argues that existence is exuberant, “overdetermined”: That is to say, it’s more than we can comprehend, and it’s more than we realise when we take things for granted. In Mary Olivers words: A blueberry can simply be a blueberry. Or it can be “overdetermined”, overloaded with meanings, associations, memories … more than we can “pack up”.

Blueberries

I’m living in a warm place now, where
you can purchase fresh blueberries all
year long. Labor free. From various
countries in South America. They’re
as sweet as any, and compared with the
berries I used to pick in the fields
outside Provincetown, they’re
enormous. But berries are berries. They
don’t speak any language I can’t
understand. Neither do I find ticks or
small spiders crawling among them. So,
generally speaking, I’m very satisfied.

There are limits, however. What they
don’t have is the field. The field they
belonged to and through the years I
began to feel I belonged to. Well,
there’s life, and then there’s later.
Maybe it’s myself that I miss. The
field, and the sparrow singing at the
edge of the woods. And the doe that one
morning came upon me unaware, all
tense and gorgeous. She stamped her hoof
as you would to any intruder. Then gave
me a long look, as if to say, Okay, you
stay in your patch, I’ll stay in mine.
Which is what we did. Try packing that
up, South America.

In our next episode, we´ll talk and write m

More about William James Desmond here in our article and here in our podcast.