From Upstream, By Mary Oliver
- nirvanahopemusic
- Apr 11
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 12
Currently making my way back through this (amazing) collection of essays. Always have felt profoundly connected to Oliver's works. Encourage all to spend some time with her poetic prose and captivating poetry. Sharing a couple of excerpts i've been reflecting on from Upstream.
From Upstream:
"I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice--I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating-- its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave. And there is the attentive, social self. This is the smiler and the doorkeeper. This is the portion that winds the clock, that steers through the dailiness of life, that keeps in mind the appointments that must be made, and then met. It is fettered to a thousand notions of obligation..."
"certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child nor a servant of the hours.
Its is a third self, occasional in some, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always--there are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be separated from the entire life,"
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