I am awakening myself through words and poetry
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- January 27, 2019
- 1215
My favorite poet Mary Oliver died last week. I’ve always written poetry, and although that doesn’t necessarily make me an accomplished poet, it has always made me feel like I’m on the cusp of a personal battle, a war with words meant to convey much more, if you parse the lines of it.
Mary was a giant, and her words startled me into action somewhere in my early 40s. A favorite line from her goes like this, “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” Upon reading you could wonder why a box of darkness was a gift until you sift and ponder and realize that crashing through darkness brings light.
Or at least most of the time it does, if we recognize it.
None of us travel this life unscathed, and I’ve learned the quicker we accept culpability in any given situation — allowing our faults to push up and out — the quicker we examine them. I remember the simple tenets of growing up: remember to say thank you, always say I’m sorry if it’s your fault and forgive quickly so you can move on. But as basic as those truths are, it’s another thing to live them. Accepting one’s faults, instead of spinning it into another truth, is something I see happening at an alarming rate. Can we recognize our own darkness instead of foisting the blame upon another?
Mary Oliver said, “Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I pondered that and pondered that and became irrational with the thought that I would squander what I knew I was to do, to accomplish, to let go of, that endless minutes spent in silent reflection would suddenly find me awake at 80 years old not having done one whit of what I knew myself to be.
I was raising children, cooking foods, mowing a never-ending loop of endlessly growing grass that never stopped itself from growing. Did I consider whether I needed to step out of my circular rhythms? Grass doesn’t care, and neither do children that are growing up and out as well; husband and job also stuck on the same time wavelength as new notions went awry in my head. It was an implosion and explosion at the same time, the wonder of womanhood as it discovers it’s more than the next recipe to make or throw pillow to fluff on the couch. And as the pieces fell, I knew although I was comfortable in who I was, I needed to change her just a bit to survive.
“Listen, are you breathing — just a little — and calling it a life?” Mary Oliver says, as my eyes closed, and I let the words wrap around me. I knew then I was more than what society said I should be. I was wife and mother and daughter and sister, but I was uniquely me. I had my own talents to share, a voice to be heard and many words that needed written. On my desk is a stack of journals that have poetry penned in them, line after line, and that need compiled and shared, just as Mary Oliver knew.
I am not Mary Oliver; I am Melissa Herrera. But words we write in pain and sorrow should be shared in womanhood’s cutting through of life’s layers, the lifting back of suffocating folds of patriarchy and the tamping down of who we are because of gender roles. I reject those pressed-upon norms, accepting who I was made to be and releasing my bindings. I will continue to peel back what has been sealed, sharing my simple words of discovery, and expose it to the light of the blazing sun.
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
— Mary Oliver