Why not get started immediately?

Ahem, a somewhat delayed not very immediate catch up post from new year's day.

1 January 2024

Extract from Mary Oliver’s poem: ‘The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac’.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

I love the urgency of this poem, It has a driving compulsion about it that neither romanticises or dismisses the world, but occupies it fully: “..so much to admire, to weep over.” Mary Oliver reminds us not to waste our lives.

Could this poem be a blessing for 2024, a guide?

I am thinking a lot about fundamentalism these days, not that of the right, which is familiar and distant, but the rising fundamentalist thinking I see on the once-moderate left. How the loudest left-identified commentators are revelling in black and white, us versus them thinking. If you do not think exactly as I do, they say, you are our mortal and most immoral enemy. Mild and thoughtful criticisms are catastrophised as the very worst thing possible. In their world there are only followers and heretics. Commentators associated with the left garner thousands of followers while making no distinction between the fearful and the fascists, between the far-fetched and the far-right, between those they think are wrong and the Reich. A religious fervour that is blind to its own errors and doing profound damage. I have whole essays, whole books I want to write about that.

For now, I want to say yes, I will carry into this year Mary Oliver’s poem as a kind of talisman. It seems to me to be open and attentive and quite the opposite of the thought-stopping slogans, the mindless memes, the tribal truisms that say little and achieve less. The New Zealand left that dominates the airwaves and the web has stopped listening, It is interested only in telling and telling off. ‘Bless the eyes’, says Mary Oliver grounded in her senses, grounded in the real not the rhetoric, ‘bless the listening ears’.

This morning, the first morning of 2024, Joe and I sat in the sun at the top of our garden drinking tea. I’ve read that being outside first thing helps our body sleep better at night. There was bright light pouring into us from every direction, the slightest of breezes. From up there we saw hills and trees, the old, once submerged sea cliff, the power lines and the railway track. The white clouds looked painted on. Our cat prowled around looking, as he always does, alert and astonished by the world. As if everything he finds is new. For minutes on end a blackbird chirped and a reversing truck beeped. The world issuing urgent, unceasing alarms.