Nanette

“Sometimes I think, were I just a little rougher made, I would go altogether to the woods—to my work entirely, and solitude, a few friends, books, my dogs, all things peaceful, ready for meditation and industry—if for no other reason than to escape the heart-jamming damages and discouragements of the worlds mean spirits. But, no use. Even the most solitudinous of us is communal by habit, and indeed by commitment to the bravest of our dreams, which is to make a moral world. The whirlwind of human behavior is not to be set aside.”
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

“But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.”
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

“Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older -- a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else -- standing up! -- that hadn't yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of the dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

sweet cousin.”
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

“Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems