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.

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.

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. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.

And this is what I learned: that 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.

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.

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether.

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.

Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.

sense of “inherited responsibility”—to do, of course, with received wealth and a sense of using it for public good.

For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.

it presupposes the heart’s spiritual awakening as the true work of our lives. That this might take place in as many ways as there are persons alive did not at all disturb Emerson, and that its occurrence was the beginning of paradise here among the temporal fields was one of his few unassailable certainties.

New England transcendentalists.

All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole

proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists. Emerson would not turn from the world, which was domestic, and social, and collective, and required action.

“The soul makes the body.”

the real subject of Poe’s work, which is the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it—anything

“The light of the body is the eye.” (MATTHEW 6:22)

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me.

Something in me still starves.

Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.

In my mind now, in any comparison of demonstrated truths and unproven but vivid intuitions, the truths lose.

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one.

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

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