A Thousand Mornings

by Mary Oliver

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. Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer? So I just listened, my pen in the air.

Have I lived enough? Have I loved enough? Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any conclusion? Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? Have I endured loneliness with grace? I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it. Actually, I probably think too much. Then I step out into the garden, where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man, is tending his children, the roses.

There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening. I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved. Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them. If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind.

Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.

So let us go on, cheerfully enough, this and every crisping day, though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed.

Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember their original clarity?

All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing.

Thus: the black snake floating over the leaves of the old year and down to the pond, to the green just beginning to fuzzle out of the earth, also, like smoke.

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.

No, there’s no escaping, nor would I want to escape this outgo, this foot-loosening, this solution to gravity and a single shape. Now I am here, later I will be there. I will be that small cloud, staring down at the water,

For often I see his shape in the clouds and this is a continual blessing.