A Thousand Mornings

by Mary Oliver

The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.

Could anyone figure it out, to a finality? So why spend so much time trying. You fuss, we live.

For some things there are no wrong seasons.

Which is what I dream of for me.

the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be

When a man says he hears angels singing he hears angels singing. When a man says he hears angels singing, he hears angels singing.

He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine’s forelock then looking around as though to make sure he’s alone; then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and, copying nothing, begins

easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking, as though his subject now was his true self, which of course was as dark and secret as anyone else’s, and it was too hard— perhaps you understand— to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky.

we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.

Sleep comes its little while. Then I wake in the valley of midnight or three a.m. to the first fragrances of spring which is coming, all by itself, no matter what. My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have. My body says, will this pounding ever stop?

little by little I learned to love my life. Though sometimes I had to run hard— especially from melancholy— not to be held back.

In those years I did everything I could do and I did it in the dark— I mean, without understanding. I ran away. I ran away again. Then, again, I ran away. They were awfully little, those bees, and maybe frightened, yet unstoppably they flew on, somewhere, to live their life.

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation. Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. Are you following me?

I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.

This is spring, by the rattled pond, in the shambled woods, as spring has always been and always will be

no matter what we do in the suburbs.

black snake gliding across the field you think you own.

Not enough is a poor life. But too much is, well, too much.

Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition is the best for by evening you know that you at least have lived through another day) and let the disasters, the unbelievable yet approved decisions, soak in. I don’t need to name the countries, ours among them. What keeps us from falling down, our faces to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?

Every day I’m still looking for God and I’m still finding him everywhere, in the dust, in the flowerbeds. Certainly in the oceans, in the islands that lay in the distance continents of ice, countries of sand each with its own set of creatures and God, by whatever name. How perfect to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket. But it’s late, for all of us, and in truth the only ship there is is the ship we are all on burning the world as we go.

I can’t say much more, except that it all happened in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt like the bliss of a certainty and a life lived in accordance with that certainty. I must remember this, I thought, as we fly back

to America.

Pray God I rememb...