Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we only look, and see.

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

Impossible to believe we need so much as the world wants us to buy. I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips than I could possibly use before I die. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. And I suppose sometime I will. Old and cold I will lie apart from all this buying and selling, with only the beautiful earth in my heart.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

All things are inventions of holiness. Some more rascally than others.

Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.

And my life, which is my body surely, is also something more— isn’t yours? I suppose the deer