I have found myself thinking of summer fields

~ Live & Learn

I have found myself thinking of summer fields. Fields full of flowers— poppies or lupines. Or, here, fields where the roses hook into the dunes, and their increase is manyfold. All summer they are red and pink and white tents of softness and nectar, which wafts and hangs everywhere— a sweetness so palpable and excessive that, before it, I’m struck, I’m taken, I’m conquered; I’m washed into it, as though it was a river, full of dreaming and idleness— I drop to the sand, I can’t move; I am restless no more; I am replete, supine, finished, filled to the last edges with an immobilizing happiness.

~ Mary Oliver, from “Owls” in Upstream: Selected Essays 

Photo: Bart Ceuppens (Belgium) with Poppies (via drxgonfly)

21 thoughts on “I have found myself thinking of summer fields”

  5. There is a way in which her words bring us right down to our center. Peaceful, gentle. I love her. Thanks for starting our Sunday with this. Happy day, David.

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    1. So true Roseanne. She’s amazing… Makes me feel like:

      “She had this way of magnifying one’s simple words and experiences. One would hand her a bit of information as dull as a lump of lead. She would hand it back glittering like diamonds. I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two glasses of an excellent champagne. She was a life-enhancer. That was one of her own favorite phrases.”

      ~ Harold Nicolson, on Virginia Woolf, featured in Virginia Woolf: A Biography

      or

      “I enunciated. The more I pronounced the words, the more the words lost all of their meaning. Say anything too much, and soon language becomes pummeled nothing. Totally estranging, inadequate, and without substitute. Your tongue may as well be numb.”

      ~ Durga Chew-Bose, from “Heart Museum” in Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017)

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