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What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

Mary Oliver

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Mary Oliver
Age: 83 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: January 17
Climate Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maple Heights
Ohio
Mary Jane Oliver
Purpose
Keep
Life
Modest
Breathing
Places
Willing

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And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
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The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.
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The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
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The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things
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Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
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My work is loving the world.
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The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.
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...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
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I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere I finally just stop and write.
Mary Oliver
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Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Mary Oliver
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We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
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Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
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Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
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Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
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I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
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I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
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So every day So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.
Mary Oliver
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Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.
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Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Mary Oliver