“…Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.
I quickly found for myself two such blessings – the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place…”
-Mary Oliver, from “Staying Alive,” Upstream : Selected Essays.
I take this to be true, so true, and have returned to this passage again and again. It occurs to me, however, that often even adults are powerless to change difficult situations. I am thinking first of people caught in a zone of war. I am thinking of prisoners, but also I am thinking of an elderly woman slip-sliding into dementia, moved in her own best interest into a home where she will be cared for, and kept safe. She may not understand why she is there, or why her family don’t take her home with them. Why? What awful thing have I done to be held here against my will?
Also, I am thinking of a young woman with young children and no money, and a man who abuses her, who grinds her into the dirt beneath his boot. Lack of money and shame and humiliation and fear keep her locked into a situation she cannot seem to change.
The natural world and the world of literature offer respite for both of these women. Not salvation, they cannot offer that, but they can and do offer respite.
And so I kept the birdfeeder outside Mom’s window filled with seeds. I tended to her plants and brought her fresh flowers. I took her out for walks in the gardens, for drives down to the river to listen to the “quiet” (her own word for what we found there), to my home to see my own garden, and to hear the birdsong. And I read to her from a novel that we both enjoyed – how I loved to hear her chuckle at some of the antics of the characters in that book – and from the Bible. I read to her some Bible commentary from a book she had, and some of that was quite philosophical but Mom was an intelligent woman. I read those passages, but also I read passages and prayers from the Bible and from two little books that she had, one that had belonged to her Mother. I read them carefully and slowly, and she’d nod, she’d thank me. Not salvation, but a comfort, for she was in a difficult situation.
That young woman did have the natural world, and literature, to help keep her sane, not to mention her children that she loved more than life itself. That young woman did, finally, break out of that relationship, but the cost was brutal.
I am thinking, too, of three young girls, two who lived it and survived to become beautiful, kind and compassionate women, and the other still living it. She will survive also; her mother and extended family and friends will see to that; I believe she has a strength within her… and she has her books, and animals, all kinds of animals, her link, ever so strong, to the natural world.
“…alleviation, and a blessing.”
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