Miracle. All of it.

~ Live & Learn

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life – just imagine that
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.

– Mary Oliver, from “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass” in Evidence: Poems

Notes:

  • Poem – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Art print: Heart of Aspens by Michael Zheng
  • Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

31 thoughts on “Miracle. All of it.”

  3. Miracle, all of Her.
    The fact that one can read 2 lines into anything she wrote and know, “This has to be Oliver.” Because the universe only speaks like this through her.
    And still have something new to say each time.

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          1. My first Mary Oliver was,
            “You are young. So you know everything. You leap
            into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me.
            Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
            any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
            Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
            your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
            me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
            penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
            dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
            away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
            as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
            sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
            pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
            and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
            plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
            toward it.”

            From Ten Poems to Open Your Heart, By Roger Housden.
            She opened my heart.

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  6. Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry seem to me the literary contemporary Eve and Adam, they so naturally harbor God within their gifts. We are so fortunate to have had them enter our journey.

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