Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.

Estrangement from the mainstream of that time and place was an unavoidable precondition, no doubt, to the life I was choosing from among all the lives possible to me.

I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work. _______

You must not ever stop being whimsical. _______ And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

So, it comes first: the world. Then, literature. And then, what one pencil moving over a thousand miles of paper can (perhaps, sometimes) do.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.

What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

I, too, live in this ordinary world. I was born into it. Indeed, most of my education was intended to make me feel comfortable within it. Why that enterprise failed is another story.

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

creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity.

My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.

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.

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

All this, as prelude to the turtles.

The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament.

He rests upon the gnomic as a poet will rest upon meter, and comes not to a conclusion but to a pause in which the reader’s own impetus, given such a bright shove, takes over.

In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. 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.

that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”* All poets know such frustration generally; the goal of creative work is ever approachable yet unattainable.

Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.

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