Writing poetry is like fishing for your own eyes.

Mary Oliver, is not just one of the greatest poets of our times, but she is an marvelous translator of the natural world. She offers us three simple instructions for living life.

1) Pay attention, 2) Be astonished. 3) Tell someone about it.

Her poem, Wild Geese, awakened my desire to discover my place in the “family of things.”

You do not have to be good.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

She writes about the poem: “[The poem] wants to open itself, like the door of a little temple, so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed, and less yourself than part of everything.”

She continues in her poem Flare:

”When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world. Notice something you have noticed before, like the tambourine sound of the snow cricket whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb. Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain, shaking the water-sparks from its wings.”

Poetry for me is a way to wade into the crisp waters of the imagination and visit remarkable creatures: kin that remind me that we all inhabit the same home—this third rock from the sun—with its marshlands, tide pools, grassy plains, craggy peaks, twinkling rivers.

In a world plagued by disconnection and estrangement, poetry offers us a path to meet the intimate stranger, that slowly becomes a companion, tried, tested true, that can walk with you through the dark hedges of life.