A Thousand Mornings

by Mary Oliver

THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.

not saying a word. I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I’m taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I’m traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.

Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember their original clarity?

The grass singing as it sipped up the summer rain. The owl in the darkness, that good darkness under the stars.

The resurrection of the morning. The mystery of the night. The hummingbird’s wings. The excitement of thunder.

Oh the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone.

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. So if someday you can’t find me you might look into that tree or—of course it’s possible—under it.

For there was nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there was nothing brisker than his life when in motion.