Many British people, even those who read poetry, might not have heard of the American poet Mary Oliver, who died on Thursday aged 83. But in the US she was loaded with honours and won a wide readership for poems expressing a distinctively modern kind of spirituality. 

Her most famous poem is The Summer Day, which starts with the ancient religious  question, ‘Who Made the world?’ Then the poet gazes at a grasshopper that’s landed in her palm as she walks through the fields, and reflects that the answer lies in engaging with what’s before her with care and curiosity. ’I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,’ she says. ‘I do know how to pay attention’.

Oliver’s simple, direct language has made her poetry a fixture in meditation classes, therapy sessions, rehab groups and the like, where people seek a deeper perspective on their lives outside mainstream religion. I’ve read The Summer Day countless times in teaching mindfulness courses, and people respond because it addresses the yearning for peace that lies behind the stress or anxiety that’s often brought them there. 

Mary Oliver didn’t become a Buddhist, though other American poets of her generation did, but there’s an affinity between her message and the spiritual impulse that draws people to sources like Buddhism and mindfulness. 

In the spirit of Wordsworth and Whitman, her poetic ancestors, she looks to the natural world for a sense of belonging and connectedness. Buddhism adds that we cut ourselves off from these sources of meaning by seeking security in possessions, status and fixed views about life, and it teaches a structured path of ethics, meditation and reflection to overcome that.

What Buddhism shares with these poets is a faith that beyond our preoccupations lie sources of beauty and significance. A famous Buddhist parable compares the human condition to that of a man who’s reduced to begging his food, unaware that a priceless jewel is sown into the lining of his clothes. We need poets like Mary Oliver to help us imagine the hidden jewels that are available to us if we know where to look; and her poems, like Buddhist practice, suggest that we find them by paying attention, fully and deeply, to our experience in the present moment.

The Summer Day ends with Mary Oliver’s most famous line: a question that challenges the forces in our hearts and minds that hold us back:

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?’