Upstream: Selected Essays

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Highly recommended as an entrée to Oliver’s works, this volume should also be required reading for artists of all kinds, not just writers, and especially aspiring creative minds.”— Library Journal (starred review) Mary Oliver has received many honors for her poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award. For today's daily dose of poetry, beauty, and devotion, here's an incomplete collection of my favorite Mary Oliver quotes for you. I walked, all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore. My company were violets, Dutchman’s-breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns rising so curled one could feel the upward push of the delicate hairs upon their bodies. My parents were downstream, not far away, then farther away because I was walking the wrong way, upstream instead of downstream. Finally I was advertised on the hotline of help, and yet there I was, slopping along happily in the stream’s coolness. So maybe it was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us all be lost always. The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats; pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles. The sense of going toward the source.

Upstream is a collection I can definitely see myself revisiting and I look forward to reading more from Mary Oliver. I think it holds a wealth of inspiration for introspection and there are pieces of it that are still tumbling around my head and working themselves into all sorts of channels. Pieces that need to continually traipse about my mind in lewdly luminescent & emboldened letters as a consistent reminder such as, Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” — Mary Oliver, Wild GeeseI tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.” — Mary Oliver For TLC straight to your inbox + life-affirming words I don't share anywhere else, just say the word. I, too, turn into a dramatic sigh-swoon loser who reads Mary Oliver whenever my brain starts to get glitchy. She wraps my head in bandages and keeps it from falling off; burdens it with the sublime as well as the common. She lightens the incessant, violent clash between my mind and the impossible stillness it demands of my motion encased body whenever I read or write.

An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet lovingly reflects on her relationship to nature and the written word. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 CANCEL MONTHLY SUPPORT

Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing. there's a before and after reading this both in terms of connecting to myself and encouraging me to make attempts to connect to everything outside of myself too. lot of clarity, really affecting, immediately applicable.