Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

DON’T HESITATE If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

How wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints - all that glorious, temporary stuff.

Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

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.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.

More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

There is only one question; how to love this world.

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

STORAGE When I moved from one house to another there were many things I had no room for. What does one do? I rented a storage space. And filled it. Years passed. Occasionally I went there and looked in, but nothing happened, not a single twinge of the heart. As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important. So one day I undid the lock and called the trash man. He took everything. I felt like the little donkey when his burden is finally lifted. Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?

All I know is that "thank you" should appear somewhere. So just in case I can't find the perfect place- "Thank you, thank you.

How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?

Congratulations, if you have changed.

determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save.

And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.

THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.

I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

There was only myself and the world, and it was I who was leaving.

PRAYING It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.