“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.”

“Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?”

“The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they’re full of bicycle trails. And this is happening to the world, and I think it is very very dangerous for our future generations, those of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state, but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?[from 'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver for NPR Books]”

“I thought the earth remembered me,she took me back so tenderly,arranging her dark skirts, her pocketsfull of lichens and seeds.I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,nothing between me and the white fire of the starsbut my thoughts, and they floated light as mothsamong the branches of the perfect trees.All night I heard the small kingdomsbreathing around me, the insects,and the birds who do their work in the darkness.All night I rose and fell, as if in water,grappling with a luminous doom. By morningI had vanished at least a dozen timesinto something better.”

“Sleeping In The ForestI thought the earth remembered me,she took me back so tenderly,arranging her dark skirts, her pocketsfull of lichens and seeds.I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,nothing between me and the white fire of the starsbut my thoughts, and they floated light as mothsamong the branches of the perfect trees.All night I heard the small kingdomsbreathing around me, the insects,and the birds who do their work in the darkness.All night I rose and fell, as if in water,grappling with a luminous doom. By morningI had vanished at least a dozen timesinto something better.”

“As for the body, it is solid and strong and curiousand full of detail: it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in the world that can hold, in a mix of power and sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.”

“oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.”