Devotions

by Mary Oliver

You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen. I’ll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?

Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot was missed by everyone else in the house.

I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses what war is. They would either faint in horror, or simply find it impossible to believe.

Of course I wake up finally thinking, how wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints— all that glorious, temporary stuff.

don’t worry. I also know the way the old life haunts the new.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.

And there are days I wish I owned nothing, like the grass.