Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?

Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

fiquei lelé fazendo a intertextualidade disso aqui com First Time do Hozier. "Blooming forth its every colour in the moments it has left To share the space with simple living things Infinitely suffering But fighting off like all creation The absence of itself"

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

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

As far as fishing went, we used the wrong bait and did not engage it to the hooks properly, we were in the wrong part of the harbor at the wrong time according to the tides, and so on. We were rather glad. We meant, of course, to catch fish. Nevertheless, the hours passed pleasantly, and we found that we were content to have wrested no leaping form from the water. The fact that we caught nothing became, in fact, part of the pleasing aspect of the day.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.

For I have never at all built anything perfectly, or even very well, in spite of the pleasure such labor gives me.