Night Rose

As black oil gushed into the deep blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I had the privilege and pleasure of seeing the Pulitzer Prize-winning nature poet, Mary Oliver, read last week. For some reason, the experience brought on an unaccountable fit of despair and hair-pulling angst. I worried that great art, especially expressed so gently and beautifully, should have this effect on me. Instead of inspiration, I felt desperation. Good grief! How in the world, I kept asking myself, does the woman manage to block out two wars, oil pouring into the Gulf, and the systematic destruction of our planet long enough to write nature poems? Hundreds and hundreds of incredibly descriptive and soul-stirring nature poems? For the rest of the night I felt "slain in the spirit," as Southern evangelists like to say you must feel before you can experience salvation. They may be onto something.

This world, truly, is full of grief for the sensitive soul. It is all too easy to despair over the destruction of the natural beauty of Earth, the original creation. We weep at the poor quality of life the great majority of the human race suffers while the few wallow in wealth and greed. What can we do that is more constructive than beleaguering our loved ones with the burden of our quite real and even justifiable response? Being ashamed of our feelings doesn't help. Only action can ease our troubled minds.

Exactly how, you may ask, can we reshape this dark place of grieving and despair so that our sensitive souls are not frozen by bitterness at what is, in fact, reality? We must remember that reality occurs on different levels at the same time. The wild rose blooms even as another species goes extinct from human carelessness. Drawing attention to the rose doesn't mean we ignore the dying dolphins. We must find a way to shape the wet, raw clay of grief into some slight but recognizable form of beauty, then fire it with our imaginations–a discipline that requires us to sit down with our art, even when it feels most painful and impossible. How, how, how do we go from this hair-pulling angst to creating a poem or painting?

First, we must accept our sensitive selves and the feelings we experience as part of an artistic nature. This can be difficult if you don't have friends around who are happy to indulge your freak-out for a night or two. Allow yourself the space and time to experience what may feel (and look) like a form of temporary insanity . Then lock yourself in your room with pen, paper and a book or two of poetry or prose. Begin reading. Find a poem you love. Read it over and over again. Read it silently. Read it aloud until a sense of calm begins forming like a small cloud in the distance. Then copy it by hand, word for word, onto a clean sheet of paper as if it were new. As if it rose from your own imagination in the immediacy of your grief.

We don't have to start over from scratch. At times our pain may be too great to construct a creative piece from the scraps of our sorrow. This is a good time to let those who have gone before us, have suffered these feelings and prevailed, lead us though our healing and back to the balm of our own words. The Richard Wilbur poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" is just such a poem to me. It eases my heart and calms my wild, unruly spirit. It is, for me, poetic vailium, a diazepam for the soul, a simple cure for my existential anxiety with no hangover. Why don't you try it? Begin here, with this poem by Mary Oliver:

The Roses

One day in summer
when everything
has already been more than enough
the wild beds start
exploding open along the berm
of the sea; day after day
you sit near them; day after day
the honey keeps on coming
in the red cups and the bees
like amber drops roll
in the petals; there is no end,
believe me! to the inventions of summer,
to the happiness your body
is willing to bear.