Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

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

“Sir Bear, teach me. I am a customer of death coming, and would give you a pot of honey and my house on the western hills to know what you know.”

May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.

I quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature.

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds.

And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

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

And when the old animal body clamors for attention, what daydreamer does not now and again have to step down from the daydream and hurry to market before it closes, or else go hungry?)

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Did He who made the lily make you too? I said to it, looking into its unflickering eyes. You know it, the old shag-face answered, and slid back into the pond’s black oils.

partly wild, partly tame.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.

Quickly I slipped this phrase from the air and put it into my own pocket!

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.

how could these makers of so many books that have given so much to my life—how could they possibly be strangers?

All his wildness was in his head—such a good place for it!

But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

Neither whimsy nor the detailed and opulent level of fun-terror,

It is the performance of this hour only, the dawning of the day, fresh and ever new. This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings, or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn—dawn is a gift.

The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.

How wonderful that the universe is beautiful in so many places and in so many ways.

A bathtub is a convenient and cool place in which to put an injured bird, and there this bird lay, on its side, through the rest of the day.

But the rough-and-tumble work of dying was going on, even in the quiet body.

Startling, elegant, alive.

I know I am standing at the edge of the mystery, in which terror is naturally and abundantly part of life, part of even the most becalmed, intelligent, sunny life—as, for example, my own.

This is Sammy’s story. But I also think there are one or two poems in it somewhere.

Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.

Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures.

But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.

I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf.

The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family;

But in the act of writing he is a grander man, a surprise to us, and even more to himself. He is beyond what he believed himself to be.

Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit.

Let me always be who I am, and then some.

I don’t think I am old yet, or done with growing. But my perspective has altered—I am less hungry for the busyness of the body, more interested in the tricks of the mind.

A town cannot live on dreams.