love what it loves

This time of year I tend to be reflective, melancholy-longing for those not near...


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

November, remains of the day

 oil & cold wax on canvas, 18x18in, copyright Jan Yates 2014

sold

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

 Images copyright Jan Yates,  2014, sold

as I long to be

Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?

Cant’ fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk.

Well, I think, I can read books.

               ‘What’s that you’re doing?’
the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.

I close the book.

Well, I can write down words, like these, softly.

'What's that you're doing?' whispers the wind, pausing
in a heap just outside the window.

Give me a little time, I say back to its staring, silver face.
It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, you know.

'Doesn't it?' says the wind, and breaks open, releasing
distillation of blue iris.

And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

—Mary Oliver

 "Blue Iris," from What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems (Da Capo Press, 2002)

June,  oil/ cold wax on canvas, plein air, 12x18in

copyright Jan Yates,  2014, available

about time

On a grey day I find the Forsythia to be especially enchanting. It soon will be gone, so I made the time, to respond one last time, en plein air.

 May, last of the Forsythia, oil on canvas, 11x14in

copyright Jan Yates, 2014. available (300, secure online payment via paypal, shipping arranged)

 purchase here

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I'd know more -- the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.

-Mary Oliver

Dog Songs

… Thus, we sit, myself
thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up into
my face. As though I were just as wonderful
as the perfect moon.

Mary Oliver-‘The Sweetness of Dogs” from her latest book, ‘Song Dogs’


 

Song dogs, encaustic on panel, 8x12in, so13, available

copyright Jan Yates, 2013

If You Are Holding This Book
You may not agree, you may not care, but
if you are holding this book you should know
that of all the sights I love in this world—
and there are plenty—very near the top of
the list is this one: dogs without leashes.
—Mary Oliver