Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

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.

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do.

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well I have . . . for the April rain has, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

I believe everything has a soul.

Children are powerless,

the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion,

You must not ever stop being whimsical.

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

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself,

those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work,

Were they seed eaters? Were they meat eaters? Not the point. They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking,

Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too.

let him have the last word.

But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions.

I loafe and invite my soul,

Darkness you are gentler than my lover . .

Each has its portion of the spectacular.

I do not know.

The world is not what I thought, but different, and more!

“The light of the body is the eye.”

And there is this certainty about muscles; they need to be exercised.

There is only one world.

a sweetness so palpable and excessive that, before it, I’m struck, I’m taken, I’m conquered;

So stay where you are, and live long.

Someday maybe we’ll wise up and remember what you were:

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

The sprawling darkness of not knowing.

This is the beginning of every day.

I don’t mean just that the world changed on the other side of the border, but that I did too.

What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.

I could not be a poet without the natural world.

For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.

The labor of writing poems, of working with thought and emotion in the encasement (or is it the wings?) of language, is strange to nature, for we are first of all creatures of motion.

The poet sits. The architect draws and measures,

I wrote while I walked. That motion, hardly more than a dreamy sauntering, worked for me; it kept my body happy while I scribbled.

I wanted to build, in the other way, with the teeth of the saw, and the explosions of the hammer,

Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery.

Give me a fish, I eat for a day: teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime.

A town cannot live on dreams.

don’t know if I am heading toward heaven or that other, dark place, but I know I have already lived in heaven