Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

Why I Wake Early

Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape—

Beside me the gray sea was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

and what the soul is, also 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.

Trout Lilies

The old creek began to sing in my ears as it rolled along, like the hair of spring, and the young girl I used to be heard it also, as she came swinging into the woods, truant from everything as usual except the clear globe of the day, and its beautiful details.

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.

The Snow Cricket

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.

The Lover of Earth Cannot Help Herself

How Everything Adores Being Alive

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it nothing fancy. But it seems impossible. Whatever the subject, the morning sun glimmers it. The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.

The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark pinprick well of sweetness.

As for the stones on the beach, forget it. Each one could be set in gold. So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds were singing. And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music out of their leaves. And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and beautiful silence as...

As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing. So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing. So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too, and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones, so happy t...

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

I go down to the edge of the sea. How everything shines in the morning light!

It’s like a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of words. First you figure out what each one means by itself, the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight. Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?

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. The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.

But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white feet of the trees whose mouths open. Doesn’t the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance? Haven’t the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe, until at last, now, they shine in your own yard?

Don’t call this world an explanation, or eve...

Snow Geese

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

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 t...

Listen, once again, tell you anything about what happens as again, and again, we are given this single wisdom: to know out there. The dovekie, for example, is smaller our world is to be busy all day long with happiness.

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

through the trees and under the trees. I live in the open mindedness of not knowing enough about anything. It was beautiful. It was silent.

it wanted something, it had a purpose and a few precious hours to find it, and I suppose it did.

“Just a minute,” said a voice in the weeds. So I stood still in the day’s exquisite early morning light and so I didn’t crush with my great feet any small or unusual thing just happening to pass by where I was passing by on my way to the blueberry fields,

and maybe it was the toad and maybe it was the June beetle and maybe it was the pink and tender worm who does his work without limbs or eyes and does it well or maybe it was the walking stick, still frail and walking humbly by, looking for a tree, or maybe, like Blake’s wondrous meeting, it was the elves, carrying one of their own on a rose-petal coffin away, away into the deep grasses.

After awhile the quaintest voice said, “Thank you.” And then there was silence. For the rest,...

This morning I watched the deer with beautiful lips touching the tips of the cranberries, setting their hooves down in the dampness carelessly, isn’t it after all the carpet of their house, their home, whose roof is the sky? Why, then, was I suddenly miserable?

This is the heaviness of the body watching the swallows gliding just under that roof. This is the wish that the deer would not lift their heads and leap away, leaving me there alone. 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.

Like any of us he wants to go to sleep, but he’s restless— he has an idea, and slowly it unfolds from under his beating wings as long as he stays awake.

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

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

Mindful

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.

Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant— but of the ordinary, the common,...

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, ...