When the beloved poet Mary Oliver passed away last week, so many of my friends reacted in the same way. “I feel as though I’ve lost a member of my family,” they said. I understood what they meant, even though on a personal level, Ms. Oliver could seem shy, even inscrutable at times, in a way I’ve seen many monks and monastic sisters exhibit a similar kind of inner quietude and equanimity.

At her readings, Ms. Oliver usually didn’t engage in the sort of expansive explanations of her poems or friendly chit-chat between poems that many poets seem to enjoy. In fact, she seemed surprised that her poems could mean so much to others. I once heard her practically apologize for reading “The Summer Day,” one of her best-loved poems, noting she’d read it so many times, but that people still wanted to hear it. Of course we did!

A poet friend of mine once went up to Ms. Oliver after a reading and told her that her poetry had saved my friend’s life. Ms. Oliver looked genuinely astonished and responded simply, “Really?”

What made Mary Oliver’s work cause us to feel she was speaking to us, and indeed saving us from our worst instincts? All of her poems are a wake-up call. Whether she was observing her dog Percy’s penchant for consuming books, a grasshopper eating sugar out of her hand, or a flock of wild geese passing, she taught us to listen “convivially” as she called it. She taught us to look, and look again.

“I got saved by the beauty of the world,” she told interviewer Krista Tippett in 2015. In a passage in Long Life: Essays and Other Writings, she explains what that meant. “The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multi-form utterly obedient to a mystery.”
We live in a world drenched in wonder and mystery. Yet we fill so many of our days with whirls of activity. Some of it is necessary. Much of it is not. Sometimes dusk arrives and I’ve dispensed the day in so much motion, I can’t quite remember all the things I’ve done. My “one wild and precious” day disintegrates into a blur.

This is a prescription for just “having visited the world,” as Mary Oliver suggests in her poem, “When Death Comes.”

Ms. Oliver’s passing at the beginning of this new year — sad as it is for so many of us who wanted her voice to continue on and on — also offers itself to us as a blessing. It is another kind of wake-up call. It calls us to pay attention to the people and the world around us in the minutest of ways. We could start today contemplating questions Ms. Oliver has asked of us: “What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?’

I leave you with a section of her poem, “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac,” which she wrote after learning she had lung cancer.
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 wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

May we all speak from the fortunate platform of many years, none of which we wasted.

Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
Blue Horses