## Metadata - Author: [[Mary Oliver]] - Full Title: Upstream - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. Wordsworth studied himself and found the subject astonishing. Actually what he studied was his relationship to the harmonies and also the discords of the natural world. That’s what created the excitement. ([Location 66](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=66)) - Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. ([Location 72](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=72)) - Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=109)) - I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power. ([Location 203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=203)) - In books: truth, and daring, passion of all sorts. Clear and sweet and savory emotion did not run in a rippling stream in my personal world—more pity to it! But in stories and poems I found passion unfettered, and healthy. Not that such feelings were always or even commonly found in their clearest, most delectable states in all the books I read. Not at all! I saw what skill was needed, and persistence—how one must bend one’s spine, like a hoop, over the page—the long labor. I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=205)) - And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life. ([Location 221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=221)) - And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold—but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy—and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and the Amazons flowing. And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes. ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=236)) - A writing schedule is a good suggestion to make to young writers, for example. Also, it is enough to tell them. Would one tell them so soon the whole truth, that one must be ready at all hours, and always, that the ideas in their shimmering forms, in spite of all our conscious discipline, will come when they will, and on the swift upheaval of their wings—disorderly; reckless; as unmanageable, sometimes, as passion? ([Location 297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=297)) - 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 have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. 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. ([Location 319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=319)) - We meant, of course, to catch fish. Nevertheless, the hours passed pleasantly, and we found that we were content to have wrested no leaping form from the water. The fact that we caught nothing became, in fact, part of the pleasing aspect of the day. The water was deep and luminous and ever moving; the sky clean and distant; the mood more suitable for slow, long-limbed thoughts than for taking from even the simplest husk of body its final thimble of breath. ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=334)) - She sees me, and does not move. The eyes, though they throw small light, are deeply alive and watchful. If she had to die in this hour and for this enterprise, she would, without hesitation. She would slide from life into death, still with that pin of light in each uncordial eye, intense and as loyal to the pumping of breath as anything in this world. ([Location 531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=531)) - Of appetite—of my own appetite—I recognize this: it flashes up, quicker than thought; it cannot be exiled; it can be held on leash, but only barely. ([Location 542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=542)) - Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=548)) - the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=556)) - Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.”* It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished. ([Location 781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=781)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - But dawn—dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me. ([Location 1039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=1039)) - Man finds he has two halves to his existence—leisure and occupation—and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results. ([Location 1056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=1056)) - And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one—the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself—is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed. ([Location 1073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CDVCAUQ&location=1073))