A Thousand Mornings

by Mary Oliver

FOOLISHNESS? NO, IT’S NOT Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree. To do this I have to climb branch by branch and write down the numbers in a little book. So I suppose, from their point of view, it’s reasonable that my friends say: what foolishness! She’s got her head in the clouds again. But it’s not. Of course I have to give up, but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder of it—the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

You fuss over life with your clever words, mulling and chewing on its meaning, while we just live it.

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.

For some things there are no wrong seasons.

knowing as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be

THE MOTH, THE MOUNTAINS, THE RIVERS 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? Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile time with them. And Isuggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.

what you thought you have you do not have.

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

EXTENDING THE AIRPORT RUNWAY The good citizens of the commission cast their votes for more of everything. Very early in the morning I go out to the pale dunes, to look over the empty spaces of the wilderness. For something is there, something is there when nothing is there but itself, that is not there when anything else is. Alas, the good citizens of the commission have never seen it, whatever it is, formless, yet palpable. Very shining, very delicate. Very rare.

THE MORNING PAPER 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?

THE POET COMPARES HUMAN NATURE TO THE OCEAN FROM WHICH WE CAME The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

THE MAN WHO HAS MANY ANSWERS The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.