Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.

as she came swinging into the woods, truant from everything as usual except the clear globe of the day, and its beautiful details.

All I know is, there was a light that lingered, for hours, under her eyelids—that made a difference when she went back to a difficult house, at the end of the day.

Then I remember: death comes before the rolling away of the stone.

Haven’t the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe, until at last, now, they shine in your own yard?

I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us

The geese flew on. I have never seen them again. Maybe I will, someday, somewhere. Maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that, when I saw them, I saw them as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

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.

I do not know what to call this sharpest desire to discover a name, but there it is, suddenly, clearly illustrated on the page, offering my heart another singular moment of happiness: to know that it is the egg case of an ocean shell, the whelk,

sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.

I live in the open mindedness of not knowing enough about anything.

♥️♥️♥️

over the hills and over the hills and into the impossible trees.

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.

Some things, say the wise ones who know everything, are not living. I say, you live your life your way and leave me alone.

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

his front feet, which are sometimes padded, hold three nimble digits—had anyone a piano small enough I think the toad could learn to play something, a little Mozart maybe, inside the cool cellar of the sandy

Thoughts on a frog 🤣

the mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either knows enough already or knows enough to be perfectly content not knowing.