the moment between the darkness and first light

The Place I Want To Get Back To

by Mary Oliver

is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness

and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me

they said to each 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;

and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can't be repeated.

If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

"The Place I Want To Get Back To" by Mary Oliver, from Thirst. © Beacon Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

This is from The Writer's Almanac. Tomorrow is Alice Munro's birthday. Happy Birthday to a beloved short story writer!

Oh, dude! It's freakin' Oliver Sacks b-day today. COOL! If you have yet to read some of his writings, you must direct yourself to your nearest bookseller and peruse a copy of one of his books. He is not only a genius, but he can write in a way that makes sense to the non-genius. Since I want to be a psychiatrist, I might find him a little more relevant than most, but it's a testament to his ability to write that they have this renown neurologist's bio up on Garrison Keillor's site. Please, please read his stuff. He's brilliant. I especially loved An Anthropologist on Mars
(from Sacks' site: Seven paradoxical tales of patients adapting to neurological conditions including autism, Asperger’s syndrome, amnesia, epileptic reminiscence, Tourette’s syndrome, acquired colorblindness, and the restoration of vision after congenital blindness). In a way he challenges the reader to think about her perception of a person afflicted with a certain disorder. For instance, a man with Tourette's syndrome, exhibiting severe tics, practices medicine as a surgeon (and no, he doesn't have several malpractice suits on his back). And society is really behind in this regard in my opinion. Civil rights activists have pushed issues regarding gender and race, but if you ask me, the mentally ill continue to be disenfranchised and voiceless in this country--who is speaking out on their behalf? How many of you have called someone crazy, or tell someone she or he must have ADD when they are acting hyper or something? I am sensitive to all of this--an addict is a person, a bipolar-stricken person isn't scary. People are people, we are all human.

And who the hell are you or I to judge anyone, anyhow?

From The Writer's Almanac also:

It's the birthday of the man called "the poet laureate of medicine," neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, (books by this author) born in London in 1933. He has devoted his career to studying people with unusual neurological disorders, and writing about them so that they seem like real people and not just case studies. His first book wasMigraine (1970), about migraine headaches, and it got good reviews. In the 1960s, he started working with survivors of the sleeping sickness epidemic that occurred between 1916 and 1927. These people had been in institutions ever since, still alive but in unresponsive bodies. Sacks noticed that many people had similar reactions as people suffering from Parkinson's disease, so he decided to treat them with the drug levodopa. Many of them woke up and were cognizant for the first time in 40 years. But it was extremely stressful for many of them to have lost so much time like that, and most of them went back to sleep. Sacks wrote a book about it, Awakenings (1973). In 1990, it was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

He went on to write several more books in the same vein, including Seeing Voices (1989), The Island of the Colorblind (1997), and the best-selling book of essays The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), about people living with a variety of neurological disorders. His most recent book is Musicophilia (2007), about the sometimes bizarre connections between music and the brain, and the ways in which music operates on everyone from people with severe neurological disorders to ordinary people who can't get a tune out of their heads.