Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.

Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.

There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God. And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.

If she spoke to them, I don’t remember what she said, and if they kindly answered, it’s a gift that can’t be broken by giving it away. 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.

and the silver moon becomes the golden sun— as the lily absolutely knew it would, which is itself, isn’t it, the perfect prayer?

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

Don’t call this world adorable, or useful, that’s not it. It’s frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds. The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.

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.

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

as with a match which is lit, and bright, but does not hurt in the common way, but delightfully, as if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt.

If you say the right words, the wine expands. If you say them with love and the felt ferocity of that love and the felt necessity of that love, the fish explode into many.

don’t worry about what is reality, or what is plain, or what is mysterious. If you were there, it was all those things. If you can imagine it, it is all those things.

Accept the miracle. Accept, too, each spoken word ...

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

It is what I was born for— to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world— to instruct myself over and over

your own darling face, your own eyes.

How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination.

But I don’t believe only to the edge of what my eyes actually see in the kindness of the morning, do you? And my life, which is my body surely, is also something more— isn’t yours?