There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.” I have read her poetry for years, she in one of my favorites but until this book I never knew she was an essayist. The beautiful writing and thoughts that are expressed in her poetry are also expressed in her writing. Thoughts on creativity, need for solitude, the wonder of the natural world, and those writers that she has loved since her youth. 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.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream I'm sorry, Ms. Oliver, there's some good stuff here, and I love Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

Upstream by Mary Oliver - Ebook | Scribd Upstream by Mary Oliver - Ebook | Scribd

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of the two ordinary selves with that of the creative self: Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” — Mary Oliver, Devotions I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.”Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. ” — Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes

Upstream : selected essays : Oliver, Mary, 1935- : Free

And because of the commonalities that beautiful language and inspired thoughts have with poetry, (and because she’s Mary Oliver) people fawn over them as if they mean something. And yet they don’t. No Voyage, and Other Poems, Dent (New York, NY), 1963, expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965.I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.” Say what now?? Wha?? I literally read these two sentences about ten times in a row, then brought the book to my husband and read them aloud and asked, "Is she saying what I think she's saying?" He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Upstream is an essay collection divided into five sections. It covers Oliver's devotion to nature, words, and home (Provincetown). It also includes thoughtful essays about authors Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Rebecca Solnit, in her beautiful meditation on the life-saving vanishing act of reading, wrote: “I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.” Oliver disappeared into both. For her, the woods were not a metaphor but a locale of self-salvation — she found respite from the brutality of the real world in the benediction of two parallel sacred worlds: nature and literature. She vanished into the woods, where she found “beauty and interest and mystery,” and she vanished into books. In a sentiment that calls to mind Kafka’s unforgettable assertion that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Oliver writes:

Upstream Quotes by Mary Oliver - Goodreads

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans. Certain essays were written so vividly, that I felt right there with her, seeing what she had seen when she was describing the woods. Absolutely loved this book.New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1983, pp. 10, 22; November 25, 1990, p. 24; December 13, 1992, p. 12. Oliver's body of work amounts to an instruction manual for how to love the world. For her, that story began with a walk in the woods. Incredibly beautiful and just awe-inspiring how she was able to express her passion for literature and nature within such small essays. 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, I am blessed to live on a farm with a hundred-acre woods. To me the house is chaos, but the woods are bliss. I’ve lived here for over 30 years and every time I go to the timber I am filled with gratitude. It’s a spiritual experience. It’s where I worship.