The little girl left her parents and began walking upstream, “sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore.” It was a spring day and her companions were “violets, Dutchman’s breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns.” Her parents lost track of her and thought she had walked downstream. Eventually they put out a call on the hotline of help, and yet there she was “slopping along happily in the stream’s coolness.” Maybe she had taken the right way after all.

“If this was lost, let us all be lost always.”

My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against the effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles. The sense of going to the source.

I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home.

Upstream: Selected Essays (2016) by Mary Oliver begins with this simple story, yet in it we see the guiding light of this insightful poet and writer. Oliver knows that we are very much alike, yet all individuals in our own ways. To truly live life we have to discover that individuality and its source. And in this beautiful and moving set of essays, Oliver describes how she discovered her life as a writer, someone who produces “neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the fields of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here” she writes, “and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.”

Oliver writes words in a way that suggests, but these are suggestions that compel the reader to go to the source of their own lives. Nature — and other writers — are both keys to Oliver’s self-discovery and she writes about them simply yet eloquently. Oliver, more than anything, calls us to pay attention. Her guidance to writers — Pay attention. Be astonished. Write about it. — has taken on special meaning late in my life. “Attention,” she notes at the end of the first essay, “is the beginning of devotion.”

Essays on Walt Whitman, Emerson, Edger Allen Poe, and Wordsworth are interspersed with writings on ponds, turtles, and owls. It all goes together beautifully and is written to be savored. Language to Oliver is “a door — a thousand opening doors! — past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and thus, to come into power.” And while that rippling stream of her youth was important, “clear, sweet, and savory emotion” came in the stories and poems of other writers.

Oliver, like Madeleine L’Engle, sees herself as living in different stages and times of life as she grows older. L’Engle says she is every age she’s ever been. Oliver writes that she is “three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was . . . 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 then there is the “attentive, social self. This is the smiler and the doorkeeper.”

What this self hears night and day, what it loves beyond all other songs, is the endless springing forward of the clock, those measures strict and vivacious, and full of certainty.

And finally,

…there is within each one of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasionally in some of us, 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.

“Writing that loses its elegance loses its significance,” suggests Oliver, who always writes elegantly and yet with moderation. For her, that hunger for eternity is near. “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.” She suggests Emerson as someone to study, for writing that “is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind.”

She ends this work with a note on aging that strikes my mind at this stage in life.

There is something you can tell people over and over, and with feeling and eloquence, and still never say it well enough for it to be more than news from abroad — people have no readiness for it, no empathy. It is the news of personal aging — of climbing, and knowing it, to some unrepeatable pitch and coming forth on the other side, which is pleasant still but which is, unarguably, different — which is the beginning of the descent. It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not so actively.

Upstream is full of thoughtful, attentive essays that are pleasures and tonics, while striking the mind. It is a book that one can return to again and again.

More to come…

DJB

Photo of river along the Alaskan railroad by DJB