Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape— and so, last week, when I found on the beach the ear bone of a pilot whale that may have died hundreds of years ago, I thought maybe I was close to discovering something—

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.

a singing that has no words or a single bar of music or anything more, in fact, than one repeated rippling phrase built of loneliness and its consequences: longing and hope.

How Everything Adores Being Alive What if you were a beetle,

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.

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

it lay on the ground like a broken leaf and didn’t move, which hurt my heart which is another small thing that doesn’t know much.

This is the wish to touch their faces, their brown wrists— to sing some sparkling poem into the folds of their ears, then walk with them, 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.

here in the world—his world— his gauzy and furzy acres, sour, weedy, lush, mortal.

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

Every day I see or I hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It is what I was born for— to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world— to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation.

Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?

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

What do I know. But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given, to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;

how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination.

I did not really see them. I came later, and saw their tracks on the empty sand. But I don’t believe only to the edge of what my eyes actually see in the kindness of the morning, do you?