The River Arun, Sussex, photographed by Ellen Vrana. “Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs: Ah! that once more I were a careless child!” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Read more on touching this human connection in my The Latent Greatness of Small Things or The Precious Things We Keep Nearby. 'May I look down upon the windflower,' she writes, 'and the bull thistle and coreopsis with the greatest respect.' Like neurologist Oliver Sacks, who maneuvered us around his collection of elements, or Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who wrote odes to a bar of soap, many have seen and illuminated this intimate connection between all things. This curiosity about things quickly and often overlooked is essential to Upstream and Oliver's body of work, which stretches over decades. In the day's exquisite early morning lightĪny small or unusual thing just happening to pass byĪnd maybe it was the pink and tender worm, 'Just a minute' said a voice in the weeds, Someone, Oliver suggests, must observe the dreamlike blue-winged birds that the moonlight is so eager to present. I have seen green-winged with young but the dreamlike blue-winged, with the thin white moon on his face, I only see him in the spring and the fall. The mallards stay on the ponds, and the black ducks spend time on the bay as well as on fresh water.

“I become engrossed in every leafy, creepy or flying inhabitant of the wood,' wrote Emma Mitchell in her regular sojourns into the mending powers of nature, 'And with each detail that draws my attention, with each metre I walk, the incessant clamor of daily concerns seems to become more muffled.'įrom beloved American poet Mary Oliver (Septem– January 17, 2019) comes Upstream, essays on those moments of eternity unveiled in the contemplation of nature.

Mary oliver upstream selected essays