Mary Oliver’s Backyard

10/14/22

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner. - Wendell Berry

One of the first videos I shared from the farm was of our dog, Dakota, running around the property at sunset. You can hear whooping and laughter in the video and you can’t tell how much my heart was hurting in that moment. I felt like I had made the biggest mistake. I felt like I had gotten taken for a ride by people that “knew better” than me. I felt like a silly little girl that had needed “the adults”- grown men - to tell me what I needed to do.

We have been learning so much and have been holding ourselves so close to the fire this year that I am endlessly struck by how hard everything has been and how I didn’t melt into a puddle and slide under the bed to evaporate into a cloud that could leave all of the decisions, mistakes, and sticking spots behind. I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the helping hands and generous folks we have met since moving out here and starting this life-shift. I am amazed at how down-to-earth and kind so many people have been.

What I mean to say is that if you look away for the briefest of moments, when you lose your focus, you will lose your balance. If you lose focus, you can find yourself saying “yes” when you haven’t fully checked in with your values and yourself.

I was trying to force something; trying to force this building project. I hired someone to come and put in a driveway to the farm, to create drainage to go around the structure, and to create a level pad to build on. The land we are on is an overgrown farm field- absolutely covered in milkweed, goldenrod, asters, wild strawberries, apple trees, chokecherries, blackberries, and a handful of rascals like wild parsnip, multiflora rose, autumn olive, and honeysuckle. The first months we were there I watched the dance of each plant blossoming and providing food for the pollinators and nurseries for the birds. I had fallen even more in love with watching and listening to the birds throughout the day; seeing which trees each type preferred, noticing that a female hummingbird liked to sit on the same branch of the cherry tree around sunset every evening. I had conversations with the catbirds and sometimes we would just shriek back and forth at each other and honestly it was better conversation than I have had with plenty of people. I said “good morning” to the same hairy woodpeckers on my walk every day. I observed the different mothering styles of the nest of robins behind the tent and the catbird in the grove of chokecherries.

So, when I agreed that, yes, of course we need a big area brush-hogged down so we would have room to build, I didn’t realize how gut wrenching it would be. Watching in the less than 5 minutes it took to totally obliterate the area, I was thinking more about how I didn’t want to be a bother to ask the driver not to cut down certain things than listening to the screaming inside me that was saying “I don’t want this.” I was angry at myself for not advocating for this tiny spot, this five acres that was legally, 100 percent, actually mine, that I for once actually had a say over. I was angry for not using my voice. I felt the same empty feeling I felt so many years ago, the numbing-ness of it all.

I walked around where it had been cut, and noticed birds’ nests and feathers, praying that they were from last season and all empty.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

I asked for someone else to tell me what the right thing to do was, and I got the answer that was right for them, not for me. Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, not by asking someone else to clear it.

I am learning that many bits about life are best when left alone, including me. I am learning about the nuances of life: be a learner, but choose your teacher wisely. Nonviolence is the courage to act: the courage to leave things alone and the patience to learn what the moment calls for.

That evening, I watched my dog, who was adopted from a shelter at the age of 4, right before the lock-down of the great pan-D, and is not socialized and most likely never will be, run around so freely in a way that I have never seen him before. He had all this room to really gallop around and act like a puppy. He wanted us to chase him; he wanted to run directly at us as fast as he could and veer off to one side at the last second. He wanted to run down the path to get a drink and run back as fast as he possibly could. He didn’t want to run away or chase any animals (at least in that moment)-- he wanted to play and he had the room to.

We can stand over the child inside us and scold them for their perceived mistakes, we can want to fix and chastise the “us” that, in Alan Watts words, is “the quivering mess.” We can, and tend to, think that completing a goal or checking off a to-do list will make us feel whole, worthy, and satisfied. We think we must hold ourselves to very high standards. We think we must make the neighbors happy. Make them at least tolerate us and see that we are “trying”. We can stay so busy pointing the finger back at ourselves and calling ourselves names and trying to “do better” next time (“You must do better!”).

Or we can just be.

We can watch our dog run carefree in the mess that we made and just be.

Backyard

By Mary Oliver

I had no time to haul out all

the dead stuff so it hung, limp

or dry, wherever the wind swung it

over or down or across. All summer

it stayed that way, untrimmed, and

thickened. The paths grew

damp and uncomfortable and mossy until

nobody could get through but a mouse or a

shadow. Blackberries, ferns, leaves, litter

totally without direction management

supervision. The birds loved it.