Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

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

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

Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them.

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true.

I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.

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

How does the spider know what it knows?

But it is not in the nature of crows to hide or cower—it is in their nature to gather and to screech and to gamble in the very tree where death stares at them with molten eyes.

My favorite line from this book.

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

I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.