attention, says mary oliver, is the beginning of devotion...

Some 35 years ago I started tinkering with a garden. I didn't know what I was doing, of course, I simply found solace and a measure of peace getting my hands in the dirt. Adding small gifts of color and order to a city backyard made me smile, too. So, starting in mid-May, I would visit one of the local nurseries on the fringe of Cleveland's West Side every few weeks on my way home from church and spend a few dollars. Daffodils delighted me. I was often captured by a coleus. So, too, with other small plants of blue and red whose names I never learned. Looking for beauty, bringing some home and adding it to our small, city plot became my prayer.

Last week, as our basil and cilantro plants poked through the soil on a planter shelf I added to the kitchen this winter, I realized that over the course of my 68 years I've never grown a plant from seed. Never. I had helped friends in St. Louis one spring add bulbs to their garden. A few years later, those of us living in the United Farm Workers compound/headquarters of La Paz, CA were drafted some Saturday mornings to help Cesar (as in Chavez) cultivate his massive French intensive gardening raised bed plots. And I've built our own terraced raised bed for cukes, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and lettuce  But never in all those years have I had - or taken - the time to start our plants from seed until now.

Small wonder I've been watering those tiny herb sprouts so tenderly, yes? It feels like a metaphor of both my current life of solitude and contemplation, and, my previous existence of fuss and flurry that led to flowers but not the seeds. Now, like Mary Oliver teaches in her recently published final book of essays, I mostly know that "attention is the beginning of devotion." In an article from the current Atlantic Monthly, we're told of a time when the young Oliver became lost from her parents in the woods. "In her narration, this was the very instant that she began her long career as a noticer."

What she sees (in the woods) isn't an undifferentiated mass of a forest or an abstraction called "nature." Her revelation is the pluralism of the woods. "One tree is like another, but not too much. One tulip is lie the next tulip, but not altogether." This discovery of the "harmonies and also the discords of the natural world" fills her with ecstatic joy. "Doesn't anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the middle of the night and sing?" (The essay) concludes with a sentence that implants itself in the brain, because it is, in fact, so far upstream from the way we live: "Attention is the beginning of devotion." And, of course, this is so. The unnoticed can't possibly be loved. Certain critics liked to trash Oliver as unsophisticated. But her simplicity was naked display of the elemental: Dilate, she insisted, because a world worthy of attachment exists outside ourselves, and the alternative is numbness and narcissism.

It is humbling, if not humiliating, to believe that a large part of my previous existence was both numb and narcissistic. After all, I thought I was aiding the cause of compassion and justice. And, perhaps that was true, even as I ignored, forgot, confused, and rushed away from those I loved. As some of the masters of the Enneagram teach, if it stings, then it probably rings true for you. At this late date I know that on so many levels numbness and narcissism spoke my name. It is yet another personal paradox that is hardly unique but still true: while striving to help another in need, I also hurt those closest to me. Or, as I have mangled a poem by Brecht: in pursuit of a greater good, I became what I hated. Rumi, Jesus, Rohr, and Merton suggest that until you can see the complicated humor in this paradox, you are still trapped in its shame. Learning to at least smile in acceptance over those things that cannot be changed is foundational for serenity.  

So, as St. Bob Dylan confessed during one of his own epiphanies, now I know that: "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Before heading outside to plant some new shrubs and prepare the raised beds for our as yet still unplanted seedlings, I came upon this perfect verse from Wordsworth - and smiled.

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

"When I stop and open up some space for my soul to show up," says Carrie Newcomer, "it always does." She adds:

I might have to be be patient because the soul doesn't travel by fast train or car, but always on foot. So today let me resolves to travel one step at a time, one foot in front of the next. Let me see the delights that can only be seen close up and at a slower pace. What a difference it makes when I slow down enough to walk arm in arm with my own soul.

I couldn't agree more...