Upstream: Selected Essays

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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.

Upstream Quotes by Mary Oliver - Goodreads

but i was dearly mistaken. the way oliver writes about nature in such a descriptive and beautiful way makes me love it so much more. the way she writes about art and literature and what that means to her is so heartfelt and subjective and beautiful. how she wrote about whitman and poe and blake and other acclaimed poets and what they meant to hear felt so personal and amazingly written. 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. A slim but thought-provoking collection that is rooted in Nature's impact on our lives both external and internal. It also delves into the author's personal connection to several literary greats. In a sense, it's wide-ranging but also deeply personal. That veering from one to the other provides a rhythm and structure that connects the essays in engaging ways. Read moreLittle by little I waded from the region of coltsfoot to the spring beauties. From there to the trilliums. From there to the bloodroot. Then the dark ferns. Then the wild music of the waterthrush. 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.” In so much of her work, she uses nature to point to the sacred. Then she verbalizes truths you didn't know you had buried in you. And somehow, she makes you feel more comfortable being human. Above all, Oliver observes from the “fortunate platform” of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist’s task is one of steadfast commitment to the art:

Upstream | Penguin Random House Higher Education

Folks, I love nature, but I love it the way E.B. White loved it, the way that Larry McMurtry and his characters love nature. As in. . . Damn, would you just look at that view?! Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round. And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them. Sometimes, when I'm reading her work, I'm smiling or nodding and really feeling groovy. For instance, in this collection, she ponders poetry:There are keen insights into the natural world, animals and literary masters that inspired her poetry. And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” urn:lcp:upstreamselected0000oliv:epub:4587480b-b8f6-4c79-b90d-5c5b387c6056 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier upstreamselected0000oliv Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t0qs7dp2s Invoice 1652 Isbn 1594206708

Upstream | Penguin Random House Canada Excerpt from Upstream | Penguin Random House Canada

I truly love all of them. Mary Oliver’s words have always read my mind and put my thought into words. Thank you 😊 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 also loved exploring the essays concerning Gothic literature. I did in-depth studies on the subject for my under-grad university degree, before making this the primary focus of my post-grad Masters degree, and her thoughts would have been of unparalleled help if I had discovered them during this time. Now they just hold a great interest for me and her littering of classical Gothic texts in this made me so excited to continue my exploration of the genre. Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else? Plant your peas and your corn in the field when the moon is full, or risk failure. This has been understood since planting began. The attention of the seed to the draw of the moon is, I suppose, measurable, like the tilt of the planet. Or, maybe not—maybe you have to add some immeasurable ingredient made of the hour, the singular field, the hand of the sower. Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”My other favorite is: I don’t want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things. 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.” T]his is what I learned: that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart. 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. It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” — Mary Oliver, Invitation