Mary Oliver – To Begin With, the Sweetgrass

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Originating in China in the 12th century,  Zen’s illustrated Oxherding Tales describes the inner voyage of awakening. Starting with lostness and spiritual seeking, there is the movement to illumination and dissolution of the small “self.” The tale’s concluding illustration,  “Entering the Marketplace with Gift-Bestowing Hands,” depicts the stirring image of a radiant person returning to everyday life. Now having transcended the binary of “self” and “other” and “sacred” and “profane,” they are no longer bound by grasping after image and fixed ideas. Instead, they live open-hearted, joyful, and animated by child-like spontaneity and care. Though distanced by 900 years, Mary Oliver’s poem, “To Begin With, the Sweetgrass,” offers striking parallels to the Oxherding Tales, suggesting a universal truth: Great wisdom may be, paradoxically, addition by subtraction – by releasing our preoccupation with individual identity, we enter a connection with all of life far vaster and more bountiful than any solitary “self” can contain.

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To Begin With, the Sweetgrass (excerpts)

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass?…
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
Both intimate and ultimate,
And you will be heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper
Oh let me, for a while longer, enter the two
Beautiful bodies of your lungs…

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of a single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life- just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
Still another…

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

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