Day 6 - Are You Breathing Just A Little?

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daisies,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

-Mary Oliver

"Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives." This line resonates such truth; we seem so interested in other people's lives, captivated even. We peer into the grocery basket ahead of ours to see what that person and their family will be eating for dinner that evening, gaze out of our bay windows as we do the dishes to see what our neighbors are up to, we even tilt our heads at the coffee shop to see the cover of the book that man is reading by the window. In theory, someone else is doing just the same, straining to get a better look into our lives, yet we fail to see the fascination because it is our own.

There is a scene in "You've Got Mail" where Kathleen is evaluating her life and trying to find the seemingly hidden meaning and she says, "I lead a small life, valuable but small, and I wonder if I do it because I want to, or because I haven't been brave. So much of my life reminds me of something I read in a book once but shouldn't it be the other way around?"


Most of us feel that we lead small lives, and that other people lead grand, extraordinary lives when in reality, they lead lives quite similar to that of our own. As an outside person peering into my life, or as a medical examiner performing a life autopsy, if you will, I would see a 30-year old woman who is married with a precious newborn baby and a spunky 12-year old boy. Although she currently lives apart from her spouse they are experiencing [what I, the outsider, deem as] the excitement of house hunting to become first-time home owners. She has recently left her job to become a stay-at-home mom [a dream for a lot of working moms] and in her spare time enjoys reading, writing, and designing jewelry [how creative!] for her Etsy shop. She is blessed with having some truly amazing people in her life! She is at the tail end of her Master's degree in teaching and upon completion she will begin teaching secondary English in the fall of 2012. She has SO much going for her. What a lucky young woman! She's in the prime of her life where everything is coming together! Reading back over this, I would think exactly that of another woman in my position. Why is it that we constantly fail to see the accomplishments and blessings in our own lives?

The next time you find yourself--and by yourself I also mean myself--peering into your neighbor's grocery basket in the check out line, take a moment to instead peer into your own grocery basket and perform a quick life autopsy on yourself. Then thank God for all of the blessings you have in your own life and that while you may still enjoy admiring that other person's life, you will be grateful to have yours, and yours alone.