The Clear and Simple Way

   My favorite living woman poet Mary Oliver is appearing tonight here at UCLA. There are some joys of living in a big city, though give me a poem spoken by a tree overlooking a river any time....

...the tree is a weeping willow hanging over the river. The river is deep and rich. A small girl stands and watches the river.....

....she wonders where the river begins and where it goes. Back at her house, the little house with the green shingles, there are many emotions and demands, do this, do that, don't do that, be this, don't be that....

...and here there is only the river and her friend, the wind, blowing her white sundress into ruffles. She especially loves the wind because it is invisible to everyone but her. She didn't know this at first. She thought everyone could see the wind, rippling and glistening in its invisibleness. She realized only later that most everyone, particularly the adults, were blind.

...they did not know they were blind...

...she watched them, groping around in their blindness, stumbling over things they could not see. They stumbled over feelings a lot, quite often her own. She would watch them stomp her tiny feelings into the ground with their big feet and loud voices. They could never kill her feelings though....she knew this. There were always more feelings that came from the same place all feelings come from. She knew that feelings flowed like a river. She saw that the big people all had dams inside them, which blocked the flow of their feelings, the way a dam blocks a river.

. . .She'd never seen a real dam, but she had seen them in picture books. The dams inside of people were similar, except they were not made of sticks and mud. They were made of darkness. All adults had places of darkness inside them, some more than others, especially when they were angry. Anger was the biggest darkness...and fear, but most people covered up the darkness of their fear with the darkness of their anger.

   Standing here watching the river with her invisible visible friend, the wind, and of course the weeping willow with its long feathery tresses trailing almost to the river, there was no darkness. Only light and the soft conversation of nature all around her. She knew the willow was not weeping at all. It never weeped. It never laughed either. It just was, as the river just was, as the wind was, as she was. Only sometimes she weeped. Sometimes she weeped and weeped because the darkness in the people hurt so much. Here, with her friends, she could just be. When she went back to the house with the green shingles, or to the school made of red bricks, or to visit her grandmother, she was squeezed to fit their ideas of the way things should be. This was because they were blind and could not see the way things really are. Sometimes she hurt so much from being squeezed into their concepts and ideas, that she weeped and weeped. They wanted to put the darkness inside of her, the way it was inside of them. The darkness wanted everyone to be blind.

   And here by the river, there was only light. The river was her teacher. She hadn't read Siddhartha yet, but she knew, as he knew, that the river was a Teacher. It was her best teacher. She had teachers at school and she was glad to learn useful things from them, like how to read and how to write and where oranges and tea and brazil nuts come from, but she knew these teachers also had dark places inside of them, that they were also blind, and so, while they could teach her about things and events, they could not teach her about the light, except occasionally, when the light in them grew stronger than the darkness. She knew this battle between light and darkness was always going on in the people around her.

   She knew it was also going on inside her. Well, not quite inside her yet. It hadn't gotten in yet. She kept her doors of light closed tight against the darkness and its tricks. She knew the darkness well. She knew that it put on many disguises to try and trick her. She knew that it also masqueraded as the light. Sometimes it got furious and tried to break down her doors of light. She would stay fast behind her doors then, trembling. Other times the darkness pretended to be sweet, but she knew it was not real sweetness. She knew the sweetness of the dark was cloying and would do its best to rot her soul. At times like this, she would tell her soul to run quick away and she would stand up tall to the darkness, and protect her sweet sweet soul.

   She knew her soul was sweet. Its sweetness had been with her for such a long long time. It was the same sweetness that was in the Weeping Willow and the River and the Wind. It was the sweetness in the people around her, except they had forgotten how to keep it safe. The darkness had masqueraded and battered and cajoled until it got inside them and began to cover up their sweetness with layers of darkness.

   The wind whispers to her, Nevermind. Nevermind, sweet one. It is the way of the world. Darkness comes. Darkness goes. Light remains. Just watch the river. Wonder. The river flows in the path of Light. The river is the way of Light.