Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats.

The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self—and does—is a darker and more curious matter.

the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoemakers. (Not that it is so simple, in fact—for what shoemaker does not occasionally thump his thumb when his thoughts have, as we would say, “wandered”? And when the old animal body clamors for attention, what daydreamer does not now and again have to step down from the daydream and hurry to market before it closes, or else go hungry?)

in art as in spiritual life there is no neutral place.

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. That worrier.

This is Sammy’s story. But I also think there are one or two poems in it somewhere. Maybe it’s what life was like in this dear town years ago, and how a lot of us miss it. Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.

Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.