Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

If this was lost, let us all be lost always.

I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home.

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

oracular tenderness

nothing was outside the range of his interest. I

the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel.

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.

You must not ever stop being whimsical.

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

having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.

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.

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.

no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

One must work with the creative powers—for not to work with is to work against;

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work—who is thus responsible to the work.

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.

“Never take from the sea what you don’t use,”

Writing that loses its elegance loses its significance.

All his wildness was in his head—such

retire into the private chamber of himself.

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

the door to the woods is the door to the temple.