11:11 Angels Message Board

Since Whitman and Thoreau, no one had made the grass and the sky speak so eloquently, as ambassadors to the embodied sacred.

Years before Mindfulness took the world by storm, inviting us to savor the moment, Mary Oliver had long been saying things like: “Attention is our endless and proper work,” “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” and “This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”

She didn’t say it in the way of a preacher, looking down at her flock from the pulpit. She said it at ground level, from her beloved woods in Provincetown, Massachusetts while she waited one more hour, motionless between the fronds and the mosses, for the return of that deer that had once, after a similar offer of time and patience, come up to her slowly and nuzzled her hand. There were two, in fact, and as she tells it, one said to the other:

okay,
this one is okay,
let’s see who she is
and why she is sitting

on the ground like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless.