Ten Poems to Change Your Life - Couverture rigide

The Journey, by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do-

determined to save

the only life that you could save.

The Only Life You Can Save

"The Journey" is a poem of transformation, and as much as any poem Oliver ever wrote, it is a mirror in which you can see a reflection of your own story. It captures that moment when you dare to take your heart in your hands and walk through an invisible wall into a new life. We do not know the personal history that led Mary Oliver to the truth of this poem. Yet what matters for her, she has said in one of her rare interviews, is that her poems invite readers to find themselves and their own experience at its center. "The Journey," like so many of her poems, conjures the archetype of a fundamental human experience, and in that collective image we are each able to perceive our individual story.

"The Journey" first appeared in Mary Oliver's collection, Dream Work, in 1986. The critic Alicia Ostriker, reviewing that book for The Nation, remarked that Oliver is "as visionary as Emerson." Another critic, David Barber, writing in Poetry Magazine, said that "no poet has more of a claim on the title Rapture than Mary Oliver. . . . She is more mystic now than poet in certain respects."

When I first read this poem I had just landed in San Francisco from London. That one reading made my hair stand on end. It confirmed the rightness of all that had just happened in my life. A few months earlier, I had woken up one morning and knew I should leave my native country of England and go and live in America. Just like that. Rather than a decision, it was like recognizing something whose time had come. Everything needed to change, and the time was now. I sold my house, my library; my love of twelve years and I finally parted; I read my diaries of twenty-five years, and then burned them. I got on a plane to California, and I have been there, in a new life, ever since.

The move to America was a long time coming. I was fifty-three at the time. On the other hand, it took no time whatsoever. "One day," this kind of knowing just happens. It happens outside of ordinary time. It swoops in sideways, at an odd angle, and like the swallow, it is the harbinger of new things, a new caste of mind. I was lying in my bed in my hometown of Bath, England, when a knowing that had been gestating for years suddenly stepped out into the clear light of day. When it finally came out of my mouth, I realized that what had surfaced was the true journey of my life-not its events, the quotidian ups and downs, but its underground stream, its guiding motif.

Perhaps this sounds too dramatic, too grand a gesture, somehow, for the kind of lives that most of us live. Yet at the time it didn't feel dramatic at all. It was the only thing to do. The poem might seem dramatic, too-surely, you might think, it must have been written for the benefit of someone else; though not for you, not for your humdrum, ordinary round. After all, you may say, you are hardly about to leave everything behind and strike out into some mysterious territory.

Don't be so sure. I believe that Mary Oliver's poem can speak to anyone, wherever they are on their journey. Profound and significant changes can occur through the smallest, apparently insignificant gesture. If you are in the right place and read this poem at the right time, it may be the nudge you need to fall headlong into the life that has been waiting for you all along. It may just mean looking up instead of down; but in that shift of orientation, the whole world can change. "I turn my little omelet in the pan for God," said Brother Lawrence. That kind of omelet will taste like no other we have ever made.

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began, . . .

Everything hangs on that first step. It is not enough to know; you have to begin. Mary Oliver's great poem starts with this clarion call. The time for discussion and deliberation is over. I knew that morning that I had to do the only thing I could do. In a lucid moment like this the mind is quiet with a tender certainty. It is time to start walking, to stand by the truth you may have known all along but were not ready until this moment to call by its true name.

It had taken me a long time to be ready. In my case, the shell of my life had to be softened, broken down, even, before that moment of truth could appear. I needed to be humbled, cooked in the tears of loss, for any deeper life to emerge. It was the unraveling of my intimate relationship that provided the necessary heat. We loved each other as ever, but our lives were moving in different directions. We felt powerless to halt the drift. One day, a few months before our parting, we clung to each other like monkeys, weeping helplessly at the seeming madness of it all. Once, during that time, I came out of a hotel in Washington, D.C., just as a homeless person with a bundle on his back was limping by. I burst into tears on the forecourt, filled suddenly with the pain of his aloneness, of my own, of everybody's. How frail we all are; I felt it in the marrow that morning in D.C.

The pain of loss, grief, and despair is not essential for transformation. It is possible to step into a new life in more graceful ways. But for most of us, and certainly for me, pain and loss usually prepare the way. The moment itself may seem effortless, but a lifetime of suffering may have preceded it. A new life requires a death of some kind; otherwise it is nothing new, but rather a shuffling of the same deck. What we die to is an outworn way of being in the world. We experience ourselves differently. We are no longer who we thought we were. But I do not suggest for one moment that it is easy. Nor that there are any guarantees. If you start down a new road, you cannot know where it will take you.

All the same, when you are ready, you begin. The directness of this knowing, quiet yet strong, can propel you out of your habitual perceptions of life and into the unknown before you have even a moment to think twice about it. It is a flash from some other domain that is an intrinsic part of the human experience. Poets in all ages have caught the glimmer of it. Rilke, in one of his early poems, speaks of a man who gets up without warning in the middle of a meal

And walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

Because of a church that stands somewhere

in the East.1

Eight hundred years earlier, the Persian mystic Rumi said,

Start walking, start walking towards Shams.

Your legs will get heavy and tired.

Then comes the moment of feeling the wings

you've grown lifting.2

The church in the East, Shams, these are metaphors for the true heart of your own life. You can respond to it, or you can turn away. The forces wanting you to stay where you are can be daunting. But the choice is always yours.

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice-

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

A journey like this goes against the prevailing current. It requires you to step out of line, to break with polite society. Other people will feel the ripples, and they won't like it. Any authentic movement usually requires a break with the past-not because the past is bad, but because it is so difficult for a deeper truth to make itself known among the accretions of habit and conformity.

It may mean that, one day, for no apparent reason, you simply know that you cannot continue to play by the rules you have accepted for years-the unwritten rules of a relationship, the abuses of power at work, the script you have written for your own life. It may signify a spiritual awakening, prompt you to enter a monastery, travel the world, announce your love for someone, or start painting-only you will know how the poem reflects the unique design of your own journey.

Whatever your circumstance, people will start to give you advice as soon as you disturb the status quo. That advice is likely to be bad. It will be bad because they are seeking, not to understand and further your calling, but to preserve the world as they know it. Any eruption of the real into our familiar life is bound to feel like an earthquake. Anyone who has fallen in love knows that. And yet in the midst of the shouting and the falling masonry you will know with an unusual quietness that it is all happening in the only way it can; and that whichever way it turns out, no matter what suffering you endure, it will be all right. There in the midst of the cyclone is the peace that passes understanding.

though their melancholy

was terrible.

How many of us keep on walking, how many of us stay true to what we know our lives are crying out for, when those close to us implore us to stay behind and look to their needs? So much of your life can be spent in anxiety and worry over others, especially if you are a woman. Women are both genetically and culturally disposed to caring for others, even when it means disregarding their own needs. Yet to walk on, as the person in the poem does, is to finally realize that you cannot shoulder another person's work for them. This life is a vale of soul making, Keats said; and each one of us must take the charge of our lives upon ourselves. Far from being a display of selfishness, this is the most compassionate act you can do for anyone: to stand by the truth of your own life and live it as fully and passionately as you are able.

In leaving your past behind you, you walk through your fear of the unknown. To walk on despite all the pleas for you to come back is to know that you are free from the clutches of guilt. When you are free of the grip of guilt and fear, love blooms-love of the truth. You will say what you have to say, and do what you have to do; not out of anger, nor irresponsibility, but because if you do not cleave to the truth, you know you will die. After all,

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

Already late enough: how long will you go on sleeping? This calling is passionate, urgent, even. Once you hear it, you cannot help but feel how late it is. You may have waited all your life for this one moment; there are no second thoughts. You wake to a wild night. Why does Mary Oliver insist it be wild? Perhaps because truth is wild; it is dangerous. It upsets things, brings down branches that were rotten on the tree, dislodges stones whose foundations were already shaky. It sorts the wheat from the chaff in our lives. The wild is uncompromising; its terms are always nonnegotiable, and it would rather die than not be true to what it knows. Brother Lawrence was wild in his way, tossing his omelets for God. Julia Butterfly, the young woman who lived up in a tree for two years to prevent the California loggers from hacking it down, she was wild in her way. It is always a wild ride, whoever you are, to be true to what you know in your heart in the face of the power of conformity. Like the image of transforming fire, the wild is everywhere in Mary Oliver's poetry.

No wonder, then, that a journey of this kind can seem fraught with danger, at least from the perspective of common sense. Danger and darkness are in the nature of any pilgrimage, whatever the destination. Perhaps this is why, in old Arabic poetry, travel is considered one of the four great subjects worthy of the poet (along with love, song, and blood). These were considered the basic desires of the human heart, and thus travel was elevated to the dignity of being a necessity for any human being who is truly alive. The Romans felt the same way. Plutarch tells us that before the departure of a ship in stormy weather, the captain would pronounce that "to sail is necessary, to live is not."

So when the wildness courses through your veins, you have no option but to leave conventional wisdom behind and head for the source-for the source of some holy river, the summit of a mountain, perhaps, but always to the source that is in the innermost heart. The door for this journey opens inward as well as outward, and the inner terrain is often more rugged that any outer wilderness. Inward or outward, the journey will have its own wild beasts for you to contend with. And yet from the very beginning, you will somehow be sustained by your knowing, by the rightness of it all. You will feel it in your bones. You will feel it in your blood before it ever forms into words.

Of course, conventional wisdom will call you mad enough for even thinking of such an adventure-all the more so when you start out in the middle of the night. Yet the true journey of your life requires a kind of madness. After all, from the standpoint of your old life, you may be throwing everything away for nothing. You do not even know what you are headed toward. Yet the first step can only ever be taken in darkness. You cannot know where it will take you. You cannot plan for this sort of journey because the entire undertaking relies on the unreasonableness of faith.

This is a dangerous book. Great poetry calls into question not less than everything. It dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind. It opens us to pain and joy and delight. It amazes, startles, pierces, and transforms us. It can lead to communion and grace.

Through the voices of ten inspiring poets and his own reflections, the author of Sacred America shows how poetry illuminates the eternal feelings and desires that stir the human heart and soul. These poems explore such universal themes as the awakening of wonder, the longing for love, the wisdom of dreams, and the courage required to live an authentic life. In thoughtful commentary on each work, Housden offers glimpses into his personal spiritual journey and invites readers to contemplate the significance of the poet's message in their own lives.

In Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Roger Housden shows how these astonishing poems can inspire you to live what you always knew in your bones but never had the words for.

"The Journey" by Mary Oliver
"Last Night as I Was Sleeping" by Antonio Machado
"Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman
"Zero Circle" by Rumi
"The Time Before Death" by Kabir
"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda
"Last Gods" by Galway Kinnell
"For the Anniversary of My Death" by W. S. Merwin
"Love After Love" by Derek Walcott
"The Dark Night" by St. John of the Cross