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. —C. G. Jung, The Red Book

You fuss over life with your clever words, mulling and chewing on its meaning, while we just live it. Oh! Could anyone figure it out, to a finality? So why spend so much time trying. You fuss, we live. And he stood, slowly, for he was old now, and ambled away.

POEM OF THE ONE WORLD This morning the beautiful white heron was floating along above the water and then into the sky of this the one world we all belong to where everything sooner or later is a part of everything else which thought made me feel for a little while quite beautiful myself.

It was the wrong season, yes, but they couldn’t stop. They looked like telephone poles and didn’t care. And after the leaves came blossoms. For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.

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

Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier?

My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have. My body says, will this pounding ever stop?

Oh the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone. In those years I did everything I could do and I did it in the dark— I mean, without understanding.

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.

If you like a prettiness, don’t come here. Look at pictures instead, or wait for the daffodils.

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. The matted fur, the red blood, the bats unshuttering their terrible faces, and black snake gliding across the field you think you own. L...

Not enough is a poor life. But too much is, well, too much. Imagine Verdi or Mahler every day, all day. It would exhaust anyone.

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.

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.

For when he sniffed it was as if he were being pleased by every part of the world.