Fuck Yeah Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body  love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. 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.

Next time what I'd do is look at the earth before saying anything. I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind       or to the air being still. When anyone talked to me, whether blame or praise or just passing time, I'd watch the face, how the mouth has to work, and see any strain, any sign of what lifted the voice. And for all, I'd know more -- the earth bracing itself and soaring, the air finding every leaf and feather over forest and water, and for every person the body glowing inside the clothes     like a light.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness."

All summer the children, grown now and some of them with children of their own, come to visit. They swim, they go for long walks at the harbor, they make dinner for twelve, for fifteen, for twenty. In the early morning two daughters come to the garden and slowly go through the precise and silent gestures of T’ai Chi. They all smile. Their father smiles too, and builds castles on the shore with the children, and drives back to the city, and drives back to the country. A carpenter is hired—a roof repaired, a porch rebuilt. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes. (Photo Source: Cuba Gallery)

(Honey Photo)

(From House of Light)

— Renée Loth, Boston Globe, September 2, 2007

Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone-- and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance-- and have you ever felt for anything such wild love-- do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you as you stand there, empty-handed-- or have you too turned from this world-- or have you too gone crazy for power, for things? (Photo from Flickr by the Amazing and Aptly Named Aurora Demasi)

More amazed than anything I took the perfectly black stillborn kitten with the one large eye in the center of its small forehead from the house cat's bed and buried it in a field behind the house. I suppose I could have given it to a museum, I could have called the local newspaper. But instead I took it out into the field and opened the earth and put it back saying, it was real, saying, life is infinitely inventive, saying, what other amazements lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes, I think I did right to go out alone and give it back peacefully, and cover the place with the reckless blossoms of weeds. (From her Pulitzer-Prize Winning Collection American Primitive, the poem that made me fall in love with her work. Photo by shnuckwits on Flickr.)

Mary Oliver