The Webs of Life
Today, September 10, 2025, Mary Oliver would have been 90 years old.
Today, my grandmother, Victória Prado, who loved stories and sunshine, would have celebrated her 99th birthday.
I think back of the OnBeing episode where Krista Tippett interviewed Mary Oliver (original air date: 02/05/2015). In that conversation this is what Mary Oliver said about the creative process:
“It’s also true that I believe poetry — it is a convivial, and a kind of — it’s very old. It’s very sacred. It wishes for a community — it’s a community ritual, certainly. And that’s why, when you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody. And you have to be ready to do that out of your single self. It’s a giving. It’s always — it’s a gift. It’s a gift to yourself, but it’s a gift to anybody who has a hunger for it.”
When I have that urge to create, I think of rituals. Probably because they ground me, they slow my mind enough for my body to follow suit. Arriving in that state is a necessary precursor for a long enough sit down with a pen and notebook, or a digital means of writing. In my day-to-day, rituals mean anything from lighting a candle and placing it at my desk to doing the breakfast dishes- to the very last teaspoon, followed by a thorough wipe of the kitchen counters. The next best thing I can hope for is a steady flow of words, pouring out of me, and landing softly on the page (or said screen). Those are the good days- and rare as they are, they are equally worth it.
In this slow process of building an online presence and following- what I cherish most is that I see illustrators, writers, publishers, along with familiar faces starting to appear. The joy of finding an illustration that speaks to me, to then reading about the artist behind that work, who perhaps lives in a rural town in Northern Portugal- I gasp at the forest scene out their window. Or their home is a tiny walkup Brooklyn apartment- and I wonder how it must feel to wake up everyday in a place of such creative force. Some, I’m surprised to learn, cross similar geographical nodes than I- they might live and work in Mexico City or drink coffee at the same places I frequent in those rainy Vancouver days. In the past, I opted out of Facebook, I burnt out on blogging and Instagram- I questioned whether there is good, or sense, in any of it. Wondering how to dose the obscene amounts of information that is simply always here. Something feels different about the community I’m starting to tap into and I think what differentiates this experience is that here, we’re weaving, slowly and intentionally, a community around a shared love.
Such as the vast ways image and word relate in picture books- at times deepening the story, expanding its meaning, or even contradicting what you just read. Here, I choose to portray these thoughts along a cactus in the Mexican high desert against the bluest sky. If you let your eyes rest beyond where the camera focused- you will see a spider web, slightly blurry but intricate as any, remarkable as all. A structure of deliberate design floating in midair, to represent the way we are all floating in this digital sphere- looking for ways of connecting. Of creating- and then taking what we create and putting it out there while we sit with our cups of mint tea- be it a ritual or a purely functional act, waiting for the echo.
m.
