A reflection by Debra Dean Murphy in Christian Century April 17, 2023
Alarm bells are ringing about the effects of climate change, but are enough people hearing them?
Who better to sound the alarm about impending ecological doom than Mary Oliver, the widely read poet-naturalist-lover of the world who has immersed and invested herself in soil, seashore, forest, and wetland her whole life?
Oliver answers in the way that an artist must. The worst kind of poetry is preachy and argumentative. Oliver invites the reader into wonder, into the harvest of presence, so that in forgetting ourselves for a moment and attending, say, to the “trim and feistiness” of a single green moth, we might possibly (there are no guarantees, such is the risk art takes) be initiated into a practice, a form of wisdom, a way of life, whereby in time we might come to care passionately, purposefully, about more of our neighbors, human and nonhuman, with whom we share this one world.