Today, by Mary Oliver

 

Look and see!

 

It can be an ugly world. It can be a boring world. It can be a world full of distraction. Which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes. In 1940, the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Beauford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Delaney stopped the young Baldwin. “Look,” he said, as he pointed down into the gutter. “What do you see?” All Baldwin saw was a puddle. Delaney told him to look again. This time Baldwin saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in Baldwin: A Love Story, “a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter’s black water, distorted and radiant.” It is clear in Meditations that someone did this for Marcus Aurelius. How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things—from the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam flecked on a boar’s mouth? What else could explain not just his turns of phrase but his ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being? Perhaps it was Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, or some poet or writer he met, but in any case, as Baldwin said of Delaney, “The reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.” And so it goes for us. We must cultivate the ability to see—to see beauty and poetry everywhere—because it is everywhere. We must look into the gutter. We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life, we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. Reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations can change the way you see the world

Easter Day

 

A Vision, by Wendell Berry

 A Vision, by Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.