Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.

I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.

I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home.

Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Mary Oliver the woman you are~

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

<3

This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.

And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation.

It is this internal force—this intimate interrupter—whose tracks I would follow.

I can hear that child’s voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

for the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.

are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

The water was deep and luminous and ever moving; the sky clean and distant; the mood more suitable for slow, long-limbed thoughts than for taking from even the simplest husk of body its final thimble of breath.

I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.

So here I am, walking on down the sandy path, with my wild body, with the inherited devotions of curiosity and respect.

All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.

The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart,

There is a vague nobleness and thorough sweetness about him, which move people to their very depths, without their being able to explain why.

He conquers minds, as well as hearts, wherever he goes; and without convincing anybody’s reason of any one thing, exalts their reason, and makes their minds worth more than they ever were before.”

“We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.”

the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that

He is no Orpheus, begging an exception and a second chance, but rather—I mean from his own view—a visionary. To change his own fate, he would change our comprehension of the entire world.

I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul

The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed. . . . (p. 115)

Darkness you are gentler than my lover . . . his flesh was sweaty and panting, I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me. (p. 109)

To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them . . . to touch any one . . . to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment . . . what is this then? I do not ask any more delight . . . I swim in it as in a sea. (p. 120)

And now: enough of silver, behold the pink, even a vague, unsurpassable flush of pale green.

No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.

And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one—the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself—is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed.

For whatever reason, the heart cannot separate the world’s appearance and actions from morality and valor, and the power of every idea is intensified, if not actually created, by its expression in substance. Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence.

It seemed a thing of great accomplishment, as indeed, for me, it was. It was the house I had built. There would be no other.