Book Specs 📖

• Author: Mary Oliver
• Genre: Essays
• Pages: 175 (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

A meandering stroll through Mary Oliver’s (one of my most beloved poets!) thoughts on nature, influential literary authors, and how we can show up softly, authentically, and purposefully in our creative endeavours.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Mary Oliver is my favourite poets because she is the opposite of loud. She is thoughtful without being pretentious and strong without having to prove it. She is like the unassuming nature she describes in this book, just existing. Upstream is a testament to the infectious energy of M.O. whether that’s describing the animals that she admires, or the discursions on profound existential realizations. To understand that everything is connected is to understand that the small things are big things, and the ordinary is extraordinary. I think that is the mind of an artist and someone that is able to find joy in the process.
• On creative process – I love the quote below because of how well it captures skill mastery, and on a macro-level, the “passions” that we revere in this grand life journey that is often referenced in self-help books. Oh, I love you M.O.

“I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances–a passion for work.“

• On shadow companions–this is interesting because it draws on influences that we may not personally know but figures that have impacted our life nonetheless. There is a section in the book dedicated to poets that she draws inspiration from and she talks about them like old friends.
• Tone/rhythm – This book meanders like how we would daydream. It takes its time and is focused not on telling the reader how to feel but showing them what wandering looks like. I have noticed this type of impatience in myself in my personal interactions with family/friends/co-workers where I need to “get to the point”, and although that is necessary in a society where “time is money”, the funny thing about the universe is that it does not give a shit about our needs. Experience requires detours and time, and more time, and wrong turns. Brevity destroys true insight, wakening of something deep within us, the insight that changes your life. And so this is reminder that real experience will never compare against a chatgpt bulleted answer for “how to live life”. You must go and experience the undulations and waves yourself to “get it”

“Quotes”🗣

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Attention is the beginning of devotion

And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe–that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. the extraordinary is what art is about.

…creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity.

Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honouring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves–we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.