One Time, One Meeting

“Do not find fault with the present moment,” advised the thirteenth-century Zen master Keizan Jokin.

That is “a mild-looking koan, huge in its ask,” notes Susan Murphy, a contemporary Australian Zen teacher and the author of A Fire Runs through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis (Shambhala, 2023). And, as anyone who follows the daily news can readily confirm, the climate crisis is but one of the adverse social, political, and natural conditions threatening life as we know it. Given those threats to our well-being and that of our descendants, Keizan’s pronouncement might seem both hopelessly out of date and culpably out of touch. Casting a cold eye on the corrupt society of his day, the first-century Roman poet Juvenal concluded that he had no choice but to write satire, the most moralistic and fault-finding of literary genres. Analogously, how can we look objectively at our present-day realities and not find fault? What other choice do we have?

One answer may be found in the poems of the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a so-called “nature poet” who was as aware as anyone of both the climate crisis and the “red-in-tooth-and-claw” dimension of nature itself. Despite this encompassing awareness—or perhaps because of it—her poems are notably free of fault-finding and abundantly rich in thoughtful exultation. An environmental realist and climate activist, Oliver was also a Christian contemplative in the lineage of the poet-priests Thomas Traherne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather than disparage the fallen world, she employed her literary skills in the service of gratitude, praise, and celebration. The result was a body of work distinguished as much by its tone of reverent awareness as by its formal and spiritual freedom.

In “At the Pond,” a short narrative poem collected in her book Evidence (Beacon, 2009), Oliver recounts her daily visits to the edge of a nearby pond, where every morning she encountered a “huddle” of newly hatched geese, together with their parents. Not yet wary of human contact, the goslings “clambered up the marshy slope / and over [her] body, // peeping and staring.” Meanwhile, the grown geese looked on, “for whatever reason, // serenely.”

Acknowledging that nature “has many mysteries,” the narrator fast-forwards from the summer to the fall, by which time five of the goslings have grown “heavy of chest and / bold of wing.” Unfortunately, the sixth has fallen behind developmentally. Its undeveloped wings resemble “gauze.” Reflecting on this consequential aberration and her response to it, the narrator draws this generalized conclusion:

And this is what I think

                       everything is about:

                                   the way

                                              I was glad

            for those five and two

                       that flew away,

                                   and the way I hold in my heart the wingless one

                                              that had to stay.

As Oliver tells this compelling tale, in which she is both interested observer and wholehearted participant, her tone is one of active acceptance. She takes each of the pivotal events of her story on its own terms. In the summer, the wild goslings clambered tenderly over her receptive body. In the fall, however, a fateful convergence of stunted development and instinctual migration left the “wingless one” vulnerable and abandoned. Intuiting the likely outcome of this convergence, the narrator bows, as it were, to things as they are.

In similar fashion, the narrator acknowledges and accepts her complex emotional response. W. H. Auden famously defined poetry as the “clear expression of mixed feelings.” In this instance, Oliver’s feelings include sweetness and bitterness, joy and melancholy, gladness and sadness.  All, in their turn, are clearly articulated and forcefully expressed. And though her feelings are both mixed and conflicting, they are held within a matrix of stability and balance.

Beyond her personal feelings, Oliver also acknowledges the universal laws—what nineteenth-century natural philosophers called the “course of nature”—to which she refers in the poem’s closing lines. Both the events she records and her emotional responses are viewed as the natural manifestations of impersonal causes and conditions, over which she has virtually no control. Rather than moralize this understanding, she embodies it in the most expansive line of the poem, as if the narrator were fully exhaling. And, one line later, she completes a triple rhyme (way / away / stay) on a “high” vowel (“a”), reinforcing both the muted lyricism of the poem and its mood of bittersweet revelation.

Within this vision of the human and natural worlds and their intersection, there is little room for finding fault. Things happen as they happen and are as they are. As a result, what we as readers experience is the quiet drama of a contemplative, non-judgmental mind encountering the natural world at close quarters and endeavoring to embrace its pleasant and not-so-pleasant realities in equal measure. Whether any one of us, day after day, can follow Oliver’s example and respond to the present moment with equanimity—and without finding fault—remains an open question. It is, in truth, an ongoing challenge of meditative practice.

_______

Susan Murphy, A Fire Runs through All Things : Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis (Shambhala, 2023), 142

Photo: Mary Oliver