Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

In the motion of the very leaves of spring in the blue air there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.

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

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

Do you know anything about where you live, what it offers? Have you ever said, “Sir Bear, teach me. I am a customer of death coming, and would give you a pot of honey and my house on the western hills to know what you know.”

Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.

May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.

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.

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel.

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.

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

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.