Tag Archives: Mary Oliver

Sweet Breathing

Enough

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I was asking these very questions and Mary Oliver (as she so often does!) quenched my thirst for answers. It is enough to find the essential overwhelming ecstatic joy in LIFE itself, in witnessing the wonder, in absorbing the sounds, smells, feelings, taste and touch all around us. Acknowledging and bringing presence to the the privilige of the breath, right here right now – always in all ways, enough. Thank you Mary. Thank you World. Thank you LIFE. Thank you breath. Ahhhh….

“Have I lived enough?

Have I loved enough?

Have I considered Right Action enough,

have I come to any conclusions?

Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?

Have I endured loneliness with grace?

I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.

Actually, I probably think too much.

Then I step out into the garden,

where the gardener, who is said to be a simple

man, is tending his children, the roses.”

-Mary Oliver

Flowers, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

Sunflowers are Angels Sometimes

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“I don’t know
if the sunflowers
are angels always,
but surely sometimes.
Who, even in heaven,
wouldn’t want to wear,
for awhile,
such a seed-face
and brave spine,
a coat of leaves
with so many pockets—
and who wouldn’t want
to stand, for a summer day,
in the hot fields,
in the lonely country
of the wild-haired corn?
This much I know,
when I see the bright
stars of their faces,
when I’m strolling nearby,
I grow soft in my speech,
and soft in my thoughts,
and I remember how everything will be everything else,
by and by.”

-Mary Oliver, from “By the Wild-Haired Corn”, Long Life : Essays and Other Writings

Fall, Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

The Earth Remembered Me

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I cannot get enough of Mary Oliver right now… her words are buoying me, reminding me of the earth’s deep sustenance and peace.

The earth does remember me and my heart is full of gratitude.  I am deeply embedded in her peaceful embrace today with the rain sweetly softening and nourishing…

Softening and nourishing and sweetening everything including me.

“I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing 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 morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times’
into something better.”
-Mary Oliver

 

Sweet Breathing

The Leaf’s Song

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What Can I Say (by Mary Oliver)

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

-Mary Oliver

Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

Walk Slowly and Bow Often

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When I Am Among the Trees (by Mary Oliver)
“When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
-Mary Oliver
Flowers, Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

Solstice

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This summer solstice has been an embrace, an opening, a huge release and a tremendous expansion – inner and outer. What a gift!

Mother Earth in her wisdom, in her sustaining and nurturing power and love, is as ever, guiding, comforting, and expressing beauty in myriad ways.

The wild roses at home are radiating wonder holding rain drops as precious gifts.

It is all a gift to me.

Happy Summer Solstice!

“I too have known loneliness.
I too have known what it is to feel
misunderstood,
rejected, and suddenly
not at all beautiful.

Oh, mother earth,
your comfort is great, your arms never withhold.
It has saved my life to know this.
Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning….”

-Mary Oliver

Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Sweet Breathing

Quiet as a Feather

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“Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.”

-Mary Oliver

“Let me be as a feather. Strong with purpose yet light at heart, able to bend. And, though I might become frayed, able to pull myself together again.”

Anita Sams