Finished reading: Upstream by Mary Oliver 📚

“I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.”

I am sure I’ve said this before, but I have never once picked up Mary Oliver for even the quickest of reads and not felt that I’d been given some profound gift — articulated in and through a holy lightness, and often with quiet and wry humor. Nothing in nature is too small or too wild or too brute to be disclosed to her or by her in this way.

As Oliver puts it, toward the end of her essay “Swoon,” all of which has been spent observing the activities of a spider, there comes a moment when

the news culminates and, slowly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is music to be played with the lightest of fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!
But a spider? Even that?
Even that.