“Every day,” says Mary Oliver, “I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective.”

I love Oliver’s poetry because it portrays her dazzlement in ways that open me to being dazzled, too. I love her poetry because it reflects on the big questions we all ask — about living and dying — in the context of the natural world.

Those questions can’t be “answered” in any fixed and final way without distorting the questions, the self asking them, and life itself. But asked in nature’s vast container where there’s a place for everything, they lose the knife-edge of fear that often accompanies them and are endowed with a grace that makes it easier for us to “live the questions.”

What a beautiful image of life — “hard as flint / and soft as a spring pond.” What a beautiful image of death — “the tenderness yet to come.”

As Mary Oliver says, “so many mysteries.” And yet how blessedly clear everything seems at the edge of Little Sister Pond! Not simple, but clear.

Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond
by Mary Oliver

… Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.

It suffices, it is all comfort—

along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers …

(Excerpted from Owls and Other Fantasies. Read the full poem here.)