ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

Poet Mary Oliver took on hero status for me when I was 24, living in Portland, Oregon, and in the only “bad” relationship I have ever had. What always comes as a complete surprise to me is that I was introduced to the poet through him. He was a law student at Lewis & Clark College, constantly embroiled with cause and effect. “Dude,” as we’ll call him, always found solace in the creative words of others, and Oliver was, for him, a spiritual release. I wanted to hate her. Everything about her. All because of him. Instead I found myself toting copies of her collections around like the bible.

After two years, Dude found a job interning at a law firm far away from Portland, the relationship finally ended. Oh, the poems that shot from my fingertips. The ramblings and rumblings of my aching heart, the anger at wasting time and the deliberate assumption that, with Mary Oliver as my guide, I was going to get better. I did. In fact, my very first published poem was an ode to her entitled “Bullfrog.” It rests beside me as I type. I am still proud of it, no matter what it lacks.

Years later, leaving the city of Portland in a U-Haul with a husband and seven-month-old boy in tow, we three watched the miles tick away between here and there, as we made the move to Cape Cod, where I was born and raised. If you know anything about the poet Mary Oliver, you will know she lives here on Cape Cod in the artist colony of Provincetown.

There were always opportunities to hear her read, but nothing ever worked out until one night, my friend Rachel called and said, “She’s reading this weekend, you know.”

That Saturday, we set out blazing in Rachel’s Porsche for the Outer Lands, to the tip of the Cape, which resembles the moon. Sand dunes line the small highway, kettle ponds dot the landscape and scrub pines, shaped by the wind, stand like warriors to time. All day I imagined this meeting, this reading. I’d printed out a copy of my poem and folded it neatly into an envelope ready to hand it to her. So consumed was I by this evening reading I could barely stay present with my dear friend, whom I see little of for all her traveling and living in New York.

The day had been humid and sunny. A sunglasses-sticking-to-the-bridge-of-your-nose kind of hot and yet, over dinner, the sky opened up to downpours of cool rain. Making a run for the old church where the reading was to be, we walked in, drenched, to a standing-room-only crowd. Rachel scanned the room, grabbed my hand and led me to the front, where we squeezed ourselves in between two women who pressed away from us, disgusted.

As Mary Oliver walked into the room, my eyes filled with tears and I clenched my envelope. She spoke, people oohed. She spoke, people laughed. She spoke and people sat in silence. She spoke and I could only think could I get an interview? There was her publisher, over there in the corner. I’d hit her up first.

And then everyone was standing and clapping and hollering her name and I realized the time had gone by fast (not fast enough, though) and people were lining up to shake her hand and say something nice. My friend pushed me out and we waited in line. I remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I should.

“Miss Oliver,” I said, “I wrote this poem for you…it was my first published poem – here,” I said handing it to her damp from rain.

“And I would love to interview you sometime,” I smiled, feeling more confident.

Mary Oliver’s smile turned to a frown.

“I don’t do interviews,” she said, shaking her head.

Devastated, I followed the crowd into the book signing room. My friend had already tried to help get the publisher on board to help, to no avail.

“I’m so sorry,” I heard her say. “She just doesn’t do interviews.”

Rachel and I stood in the church doorway after, gauging how wet we were (again) about to get. She grabbed my hand and we ran out. I was grateful for the rain to hide my tears and even though I rarely use the word, my shame.

The thing we have to realize about this life is that there are endless opportunities. Sometimes they knock so hard, screaming for us to hear. Battling the wind, the rain and the clamor of daily routine, they shout for us to pay attention. They beg us to be quiet and accept.

Like the bullfrog.

Bullfrog
(For Mary Oliver)
1995

I saw her there,
heard her melodic croaking
in the throat
of the Bullfrog –
Thick and mournful.
I was young then.

With her body hobbled,
bunched up,
I took advantage and pushed
the jar over her
twisting it,
watching the thick, grey
mucus from her back
stripe the inside of the glass.
“How beautiful you are!” I shouted.
She,
only able to move her eyes
lowered them,
sunset,
moonrise,
then a shaking,
like dad’s Ford,
February in all its splendor-
I knew that something strange was happening
that nothing
more strange could happen.

This time it’s me.

A lecture hall,
talk of meiosis, mitosis,
a double helix unzipping
separating,
like cool river water over
a stray stone.

I hear her again.
Her croaks ascend into something
so tangible-
I fight to breathe,
struggle to listen,
knowing my life depends
on her entirely.

-Amy DuFault

Between the Lines is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: vincepal

The post Between the Lines: Opportunity Knocks appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

When I was 21, I set sail on an old cargo ship for Europe and North Africa.

Two years prior, I’d finished college in Italy, had backpacked Europe and Tunisia by myself, and had finally come back to Cape Cod – as you might imagine, a fully changed woman. It was good to eat home-cooked food again, good to sleep in my childhood bed again and to be loved by family. But that calling to leave again was strong. Defiant. Addictive.

To this day, whenever I do come back home from trips to the city or a long vacation and cross one of the bridges to the island I can’t help but think of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. The title comes from the finale of the novel when protagonist George Webber realizes, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

At 21, coming home meant failure, old boyfriends, people who knew my rocky past, people who were content to live a life half lived. Not me. Not anymore.

The chance to hop a ship for three months and get paid to travel sounded like a pretty good gig.

Roughly 1000 sailors in training were on that ship – many, not far off from my age – and no matter what I did, I was a curiousity.

Having been raised in a household of men and surrounded by boy cousins growing up, I had no fear of hopping on a ship full to the brim with them for free travel. I had Kerouac’s The Subterraneans and Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, I postured myself as an intense writer, a habitual smoker and a drinker of coffee. My favorite place for reading those books was at the top of the ship on the Flying Bridge, a smoke in hand and hot coffee to warm me from a North Atlantic winter. On the move, channeling Kerouac, life was at an optimum. Oh, to be away.

But life out at sea for a long period of time has its own politics, government and unspoken rules. There are defined pecking orders and social taboos out at sea that would seem completely illogical, or at least not so amplified if you weren’t out there on a big ship. If I talked to a cadet for too long it meant I was having sex with him. If I left my bedroom door open to vent the cigarette smoke, it meant I wanted sex and would result in men doused in cologne congregating outside my door. I finally decided that I would just be a bitch to keep everyone away.

I ran the salad bar for all those men and it was their favorite part of eating because they could put together their own meal. Piss me off? I threatened to spit in it. Question why there was wilted lettuce? I’d give a long stare that would make them never ask again.

The bitch.

Sometimes life in a small place like Cape Cod is much like ship life. Everyone knows you and you can’t escape the politics of a small town, but you can get good at coping. The one thing that stays constant is how you react to what you are surrounded with. I’ve become an “angry” woman living here. I am the “crazy lady” who will battle the local school system so that my kids don’t have to wear uniforms. I am that woman who raises her hand at the town meeting with two others to oppose lazy, local lawmakers. I am that woman who stands up to the neighbor who says my green lawn full of clover would look better fertilized to say: “I don’t believe in poison.”

As we age, do we just become bitter and cynical? Maybe we just become more open to the fact that the world is truly a Confederacy of Dunces and we are but one dunce cap away from being one of them if we don’t fight to stay awake. Thomas Wolfe may have been right about going home: we are who we are on the inside when we go back. Whether we’re ready or not, life is constantly altering and changing us, taking away the blinders, the rose-colored glasses, the smokes and coffee and showing us itself in true form. No matter where we go, there we are, whether it’s nestled safely in our childhood home or riding camels in the Sahara under a full moon.

There are no temporary fixes. No way you can run away when it’s you who is different. When it’s you who is always the stranger in town.

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: whatmegsaid

The post Between the Lines: The Stranger appeared first on EcoSalon.

EcoSalon’s favorite 30 quotes about nature.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
-Henry David Thoreau

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
-Anais Nin

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
-Albert Camus

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.
-Mary Oliver

Only when the last tree has been cut down,

Only when the last river has been poisoned,

Only when the last fish has been caught,

Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.
-Cree Indian Prophecy

Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
-Walt Whitman

A wounded deer leaps the highest.
-Emily Dickinson

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. 
-John Muir

The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
-Wendell Berry

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
-Vincent Van Gogh

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.
-Bob Dylan

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.
–John James Audubon

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the wind longs to play with your hair.
-Kahlil Gibran

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.
-Willa Cather

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
-Navajo Proverb

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
-Georgia O’Keefe

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher.
-William Wordsworth

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
-Toni Morrison

Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.
-David Letterman

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.
-Helen Keller

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
-Galileo Galilei

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty on a mountain.
-Victor Hugo

I’m not into organized religion. I’m into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we’re all just part of nature.
-Neil Young

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.
-e.e. cummings

If there is any wisdom running through my life now, in my walking on this earth, it came from listening in the Great Silence to the stones, trees, space, the wild animals, to the pulse of all life as my heartbeat. 
-Vijali Hamilton

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Image: Darcy McCarty, D.H. Parks, Paul (Dex), Gurdonark, Alaskan Dude

The post 30 Best Quotes About Nature appeared first on EcoSalon.

QuoteDaily quotes at EcoSalon.

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

-Mary Oliver

Image: paul (dex)

The post Being Present appeared first on EcoSalon.