Mary Oliver died a year ago today. The great thing about poems is that they're always there even when poets aren't, and I've sat with her work a lot this past year. I'm watching a lot of people that I love anticipate or recover from grief, and Mary Oliver is great for both of those states. Lately I have had on my mind the second half of "The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac", her cancer poem:

3.
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.

4.
Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,
all the fragile blue flowers in bloom
in the shrubs in the yard next door had
tumbled from the shrubs and lay
wrinkled and fading in the grass. But
this morning the shrubs were full of
the blue flowers again. There wasn’t
a single one on the grass. How, I
wondered, did they roll back up to
the branches, that fiercely wanting,
as we all do, just a little more of
life?

Dear 2020,

The fireworks that were supposed to greet you were canceled because of high winds. We heard somewhere that there'd be an attempt to shoot them off at 2 am so we hung around outside an emptying party near the Space Needle to see if it was true, but the winds persisted and so we went home. They said it was the first time the fireworks have been canceled in 26 years, which is technically true but doesn't take into account all those years they happened but it was too foggy to see them. I feel like our catastrophizing has to be precise if only to keep things in perspective where we can. There's a lot out there that's a real catastrophe, and while we may have deserved fireworks we're just not always going to get them.

It's a little hard to hold 2019 in place. I think of all the slivers of ourselves we cut off and laid by just to make it through, all the ways we made ourselves fit where we were rubbing at the edges. All the days we just tried to get through. But we have a little jar of ourselves that can glow in the dark and we're sensitive at the places that were sore, and I am lucky enough that things could have been so much worse.

I think about Lake Nyos all the time, about the lake turning over one night and suffocating almost 2,000 people and no one really knows why, if it was a landslide or a rainstorm or an earthquake that set everything off. I know that there's almost no way to predict what is the thing that will trigger the rush down the mountain, the displacement of all the air. Some days that feels inspiring and most days it feels heavy. But I also think about how after that people applied themselves to keep the same disaster from happening again, and that seems likes a good place to be. If we're nothing else, we're learning.

I have a friend who posts the same survey every year addressing the same list of questions with things like are you happier or sadder? richer or poorer? fatter or thinner? and I saw it and thought, well, both. I am rounder in some places but thinner in the skin on my chest and around my eyes. I am happier and sadder both, often multiple times in the same day, happier with the woman I am settling into and sadder about the world that I'm settling into. I am poorer in dollars but always richer in a community that deepens and ripens as we all come through fire together.

I'd appreciate it if you could find something great within you, 2020, but I'd settle for nothing terrible. Let's agree to go easy on each other.