In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
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One of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year! The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver. “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly
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I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.
I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.
In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.
I don't know if I am heading toward heaven or that other, dark place, but I know I have already lived in heaven for fifty years. Thank you, Provincetown.
Let me always be who I am, and then some.
I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.
Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.
He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like th…
Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.
In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work -- who is thus responsible to the work.
And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I hav…
Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity shoul…
Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with l…
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in.