My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.“The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work - who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple." As she writes, "I could not be a poet without the natural world. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood "friend" Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, "a place to enter, and in which to feel," and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which reveredpoet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. 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." "In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver. One of O, The Oprah Magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year
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