"to be easy in the peopled kingdoms" | On the Earth-Others and Mary Oliver's "Trilliums"

MY MIND IS A FOREST: An Autistic Wandering through the Poems of Mary Oliver, Pt. IV

CONTENTS || A Quick Note | “Trilliums” by Mary Oliver | MY MIND IS A FOREST, Pt. IV | In Closing…

---

A Quick Note

The following is Part IV of my essay series, MY MIND IS A FOREST: An Autistic Wandering Through the Language of Silence and the Poems of Mary Oliver. For Part I, an introduction to Autistic Poetics and my letter to Mary herself, click here. For Part II, on synaptic overgrowth and Mary Oliver’s “Landscape,” click here. For Part III on poetry as relational and Mary Oliver’s “Whispers,” click here.

In the event this post is too long for your email, you can read it in full on the Substack site or the Substack app.

35mm film by torri blue

TRILLIUMS

Mary Oliver

Every spring
   among
      the ambiguities
         of childhood

the hillsides grew white
   with the wild trilliums.
      I believed in the world.
         Oh, I wanted

to be easy
   in the peopled kingdoms,
      to take my place there,
         but there was none

that I could find
   shaped like me.
      So I entered
         through the tender buds,

I crossed the cold creek,
   my backbone
      and my thin and white shoulders
         unfolding and stretching.

From the time of snow-melt
   when the creek roared
      and the mud slid
         and the seeds cracked,

I listened to the earth-talk,
   the root-wrangle,
      the arguments of energy,
         the dreams lying

just under the surface,
   then rising,
      becoming
         at the last moment

flaring and luminous —
   the patient parable
      of every spring and hillside
         year after difficult year. 

---

MY MIND IS A FOREST

PT IV: TRILLIUMS

As a child, I wished to be anything but a person. In Kindermusik, they begged me to don a velveteen dress, clasp my hands together at my chest, and sing with the group about Mary’s Little Lamb. I would not, I would not, I would not so debase my four-year-old self.

“How about,” so the teacher suggested, “you be Mary’s Little Lamb?” I smiled smugly, yes, then clasped my hands and sang: baaaaa.

As I grew, I immersed myself in books about mice and ferrets with cloaks and swords, riddles told by badgers. While my classmates gossiped about kissing and spread rumors about which girls slept in the same sleeping bag, I, as a hedgehog, crafted daggers from fallen branches and hair ties and fought pearl-stealing pine martens.

In middle school Spanish, I called myself Tortuga. I wished my name was Turtle. I wished I might enter Narnia, where my people were fauns and lions. I wished I might be an elf or a kestrel or have the ears of a bat or the sleek, swimming body of an otter.

In high school, when my childhood fantasies fell out of fashion, I immersed myself in the myths of my religion—I was Spirit, I was Called. I spent all my time in the shadow of the divine, wishing and praying to be anything but human; to be anything but the humanity I saw around me with their purses and trucks and judgments.

In my twenties, when I found myself in a trendy, terrible Hollywood megachurch, I was asked to prove I was “teachable.” So I tried this humanness on like a costume. I let the pretty girls with their blonde hair do my makeup and clothe me like a doll. They asked me for a performance, so after all those years I finally clasped my hands together at my chest and sang.

Baaaaa.

         Oh, I wanted

to be easy
   in the peopled kingdoms,
      to take my place there,
         but there was none

that I could find
   shaped like me.¹

My best efforts to be easy were, well, rather difficult. They were expensive and not made for me, pricey jeans that frayed all too quickly where my thighs touch. They were blundering and uncertain, like my best wild guesses whether “we’re going to—” was an announcement or an invitation. They were shoulders bumping in crowded rooms, saved seats, praise and acts of service, devoted listening, birthday gifts.

My best efforts to be easy were endless. And they were not enough. I learned this when—dressed in someone else’s clothes, my hair curled by someone else’s iron, my eyelashes darkened by someone else’s hand—one of the people I all but sold my soul to impress stood at a pulpit in front of a thousand of my peers and praised me for not caring what anybody thinks.

My hair is frizzy, it sticks out in every direction! My sweaters have animals on them! I hop around and laugh loudly, I don’t give a damn, and isn’t that so inspiring? When I mingle among the people, I am told regularly how I march to the beat of my own drum. “And your drummer left the band ages ago!”

I know I am perceived as an individualist, though it’s not an identity I find particularly resonant. I don’t think enough about how I contrast to those around me to be a genuine nonconformist. My goal has never been to stand out (though I imagine people who have known me at various points in my life would scoff at this). I do not care to be unique, noticed uniquely. I don’t need to be special or interesting. I just want to be at home in my body, in the world. I want, quite simply, to be, to be, to be.

I found a photograph of Maria Shriver sitting on a large cream couch. Her features are sharp, her hair is lush and flowing. Her smile is knowing, her gaze practiced. One arm crosses her body, long fingers resting easy on her opposite shoulder, soft on her silky blouse. She leans forward, at ease in her role. She clicks with the camera like her body knows just what say.

Next to her, in loose, cuffed jeans and multicolored socks, sitting cross-legged on the couch, is Mary Oliver. Her hair is plain and soft and white, her glasses thin-rimmed, her expression relaxed. Her jacket is pink and puffy, her fingers interlaced, hands folded together in her lap. Mary’s presence, and the juxtaposition of their poses, makes Maria Shriver look like she was cut out of a magazine and gluesticked in.

Mary, in her own way, also looks at ease—though not so much with the camera, which she doesn’t look to care to impress. Sitting there, she appears comfortable, unconcerned, rooted. She seems Someone At Home in the world.

So I entered
         through the tender buds…²

As I’ve grown into myself, I’ve made many, many Leavings. These have been excruciating and simple: I left the communities that could not, in the end, embrace me. I left the religion of my youth, the mythology of the special and the called and the holy. I left the image, the fabrication of a person I was not. I stripped down to my earthbody and went, “though the voices around you / kept shouting / their bad advice…”³

As a child, when I named myself an otter or a peregrine, I gained a freedom, a sense of contentedness in my imagined body, its shimmering wings. But from that “not a person, but earth-other” framework, I learned my human body as something to despise, my human relationship to the world as fragmented and lonely. I was not easy in the birded kingdom with my dense bones and mammary glands. But as a young adult, when I tried to reconcile this sense of displacement, to drape the idea of the human over my shoulders, to wear ease like a costume, I discovered I was even lonelier than I had been as a bird.

There was shame in being human, set apart from the world in which I felt so at home. Let me in. There was shame too in not being human enough, in standing amidst my own species and being handled like a pet. Laughed at like a silly, hapless creature.

When I learned I was autistic, I was no longer a mystery. A what are you, a thing, a project, an inspiring drummerless marcher who doesn’t give a shit. I understood immediately in my bones that my humanity is intrinsic, it belongs to me. I am a person in the world.

But as much as I am a person, irreducibly human, I am not aligned with humanity as it is sold to us—it doesn’t suit me, it never has. What suits me is the rootedness of trees, the silence of river rocks, a chatty communion with red squirrels and purple finches. These lines we draw between the human and the nonhuman are, as I see it, inherently false. My instinct for intimacy with the earth-others and my belief that we are, while human, also creatures—that we are the natural world, indistinguishably connected, earthlings, all of us, person and moss and mustelid—it all, as if by magic, fit.

I wanted to be let into the moon. I wanted to be easy in the peopled kingdoms. I wanted to know my place here, in the family of things. “So I entered / through the tender buds…”⁴

I listened to the earth-talk,
   the root-wrangle,
      the arguments of energy,
         the dreams lying

just under the surface,
   then rising,
      becoming
         at the last moment

flaring and luminous —
   the patient parable
      of every spring and hillside
         year after difficult year.⁵

My mind is a forest.

Every morning, I wake here in my humanity. My personhood. My earthbody, the soft animal of me in all her contentment among the earth-others, who are my kin, who are my people. “I entered / through the tender buds.” That I wake here is not by chance, but is the work of all that root-wrangle, the deep rumble of an understory “becoming / at the last moment // flaring and luminous…”

I have never been more myself than since making peace with the state of my mindgarden, soft and brittle, strange and cluttered and peaceful and wild. I have never felt so easy in the peopled kingdoms than since realizing I don’t have to be.

I speak, I write, I live an Autistic Poetic. If it feels out of place, consider, please, this might be because it is rooted in a place you’ve forgotten.

We are earthlings, you and I, made of the same starstuff that created everything you know, everything you touch and praise and use. To be human is to be here, now, named and explained by the world that gives you life each morning. Listen to the silence speak to you, and it will, of the wonderful inexpressibility of being alive.

I am resistant to what feels cliché, to what feels overspoken or habitually recited, which is largely why I didn’t include what is arguably Mary’s most celebrated poem, which comes from Dream Work, as the foundation for any of my reflective essays.

But as I wrote, I kept coming back to it, turning it over in my hands, seeing it anew. I think, with all this talk of shared language, that it is sensible to end with something familiar, something perhaps overspoken but held sacred for a reason.

It is my hope that as you read this closing chapter, this final poem, as you shut this invisible book, you will take something with you—you will remember something of our Mary, of attention and devotion, of our unbreakable kinship with the world, of our perhaps unpayable debt to the land that has mothered us. I hope you will take something to this world as well, to your reading of poetry, to your reading of humanity.

The world offers itself to your imagination.

---

WILD GEESE

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
   love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

ENDNOTES

1. Oliver, “Trilliums,” 10, lines 8-14.

2. Oliver, “Trilliums,” 10, lines 15-16.

3. Oliver, “The Journey,” 38, lines 3-5.

4. Oliver, “Trilliums,” 10, lines 15-16.

5. Oliver, “Trilliums,” 10-11, lines 25-36.