“Where I live … perfect strangers … turn and say to each other, without embarrassment or hesitation: isn’t it beautiful!
“Indeed it is. We are gifted wherever we look….
“We know there are more people coming, every year, to our personal paradise. No one, however, has yet suggested we close the bridge. And not only because of the commercial gain realized from tourism, but, I think, out of a sense of fairness — what we have in plenty, and all year, surely should be available to everyone, at least for a while. Moreover, there is always the hope and the chance that the astonishing natural beauty here will open the heart, of both tourist and resident, to a new striving after virtue: such immutable suggestive power the natural world has always had, and offers to each of us.”
From Long Life, Essays and Other Writings
—–
Landscape by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work
Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?
Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.
Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky—as though
all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.