Books and Nature

By: Mary Oliver

Winslow Homer - Girl Reading Under an Oak Tree (1879)

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
— Mary Oliver

Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them.

Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing. I quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature.

These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place. In the first of these—the natural world—I felt at ease; nature was full of beauty and interest and mystery, also good and bad luck, but never misuse.

The second world—the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it.

I relaxed in it.

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds.

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.

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Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor.

With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them.

Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.

Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.

May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream.

May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.

You can find these poetic, beautiful passages in Mary Oliver’s fantastic book—Upstream