Mary Oliver

"Once, years ago, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and it was the most casual of moments_ as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity-the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since."

(pp. 33-34 Long Life)

Radiance and Results

Mary Oliver writes in Long Life p.23, "The mountain and the forest are sublime but the valley soil raises richer crops. The perfect gift is no longer a house but a house, or a mind divided. Man finds he has two halves of his existence: Leisure and occupation, and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results."

She knows that appreciation of nature is over run by the struggle for existence. A tree isn't beautiful, it's timber or firewood. 

"...the experience led him, led his mind, from simple devotion of that beauty which is harmony, a kindly ministry of thought to nature's deeper and inexplicable greatness. The gleam and tranquility of the natural world he loved always, and now he honored also the world's brawn and mystery, it's machinations that lay beyond our understanding--that are not even namable. What Wordsworth praised thereafter was more than the arrangement of concretizations and vapors into appreciable and balanced landscapes; it was, also, the whirlwind."