I recently watched the documentary about poet Mary Oliver on PBS–Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. Oliver’s poetry, like Thoreau’s essays, is an invitation to pay attention. She writes about ordinary things, like nature, animals, walking, water, weather, silence, and yet her poems are never ordinary. Birds, fields, even a walk through a forest, are moments when we can contemplate both life and death.  

Oliver has taken up much space in my commonplace books over the years. Most recently, I added a few passages from her book Blue Pastures. One of the ideas I keep returning to in Oliver’s work is the tension between the brief hours of our lives and the question of how we should spend them. She writes with an awareness that our time is limited, but at the same time she doesn’t approach mortality as something to be afraid of. Instead, the knowledge that life ends seems to intensify the way she pays attention to the present. A day matters because there will not be an endless number of them. In fact, we’re not guaranteed another day tomorrow. A walk matters because we may not always be able to take it. Oliver teaches us that the particular tree outside our window matters because we will never see that exact tree, in that exact light, on that particular morning again. Oliver’s words are always simple. She doesn’t use words you need a dictionary to understand. But her points are profound.

Any day can seem ordinary while we’re living it. We wake up, get ready, go to work, come home, prepare dinner, wash the dishes, maybe read or watch TV or, heaven forbid, scroll, and go to bed. Rinse and repeat. As we examine each individual day, it might seem like nothing much happened. But if we look at the world through Oliver’s eyes, then ordinary days become moments of wonder. The perky smell of coffee becomes something to savor. A glance at a crisp blue sky, dotted with billowy clouds on a humid afternoon, becomes glorious. Oliver, like Thoreau before her, teaches us that there is beauty in the mundane places we pass daily. 

My commonplace book helps me by reminding me to notice more. Choosing what information to put into my book forces me to pay attention both to the knowledge and to my awareness of that knowledge. I’m saying to myself, “This is worth remembering.” For whatever reason, these particular words caused me to pause, look again, and consider what the words are trying to teach me. 

One thing in particular that I love about keeping a commonplace book is returning to something I wrote down months or years ago and remembering the inspiration when I read those words the first time. Also, there are times when I’ll look at a passage years after adding it to my commonplace book, and I realize that I view the words differently this time. Reading Oliver’s thoughts about nature resonates differently depending on where I am in my life at that moment. 

One of the reasons Oliver’s poetry resonates with so many people is because she keeps returning us to an important question, the same question Thoreau wanted us to grapple with: what are we paying attention to? What does it mean to live a life rather than simply pass through one? And, of course, one of the most essential questions of all:  What are we going to do with this one wild and precious life? The question is deceptively simple, and our answers can be profound if we allow ourselves to dig deep enough for our most honest answer. How would you spend the last day of your life? What would you change if you stopped assuming that you had more time?

Lately, I’ve been adding quotes and ideas to my commonplace book that help me toward an answer to my own essential question, one I borrowed from Montaigne: How to live? Of course, there isn’t one correct answer to that question. My commonplace book isn’t a place where I expect to solve every question about my life. Instead, my commonplace book allows me to interact with my reading, and it’s where I can think through these various ideas. 

Mary Oliver’s poems, like Thoreau’s essays,  have a way of sending me outside under the sky. From these great thinkers, I’ve learned that being outside is a great gift, even on the hot, humid days we have during the summer in Las Vegas. Even on the 90+ degree Fahrenheit days we’re still having in October. Yet even sitting on my little patio, with a glass of iced coffee, watching the birds fly over the valley in the distance, allows me to take the time to notice the world as it happens, things that I used to ignore, but now I know better. I find a similar sense of contentment when I add new thoughts to my commonplace book. Over the past few years, that book has helped me as I learn to be in the moment and pay attention.