I spent forty beautiful minutes at Lake Bonnie Park, reading Mary Oliver and Robert Hoss.

While I was reading Hoss’ poem, I just kept thinking about the astounding similarities and defining differences between the two’s world view. Even more than Mary Oliver’s poetry, though, I kept bringing it back to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

Robert Hoss looks at the world and is wowed. Not being able to sustain wonder, he says, is an evolutionary coping mechanism to getting us out of worshiping nature and onto more productive ventures. If we could be as amazed at everything as we were the first time we saw it, or experienced it, “we’d have never gotten off of our knees.”

Clearly being amazed by the world is something deeply personal.

Walt Whitman, in the same way, is always delving into nature. (Oliver, too. I keep leaving her out like the redheaded stepchild.) He’s amazed by the texture of grass and the scent of the woods and wet moss, and the perfume of the world and the call of the birds, the toads, the wild cats. He is always talking about replying to the call of the wild.

Mary Oliver, in the same way, references nature in a glorious, gorgeous simplicity. The common ground between all of them is their reverence of nature. Between Oliver and Whitman, though, in their natural world, God is never far off.

Walt Whitman says that the grass is like a handkerchief, dropped by God, so that people can explore it and prod at it and ask who it belongs to, and they will find his signature in the corner.

Hoss looks at the grass and comments on how inexplicable the evolution of the world into something this diverse and beautiful was. Where Whitman sees God, Hoss sees “cells dividing” and multiplying in complex ways. His eyes are open, much more than anyone I know, but his heart seems to be closed.