Thursday, August 27, 2015

Reading

“One or Two Things”
Don’t bother me....
I’ve just been born.

The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves delicately, and well enough to get it where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping here and there to fuzzle the damp throats of flowers and the black mud;
up and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes for long delicious moments it is perfectly lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice,
crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.
One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning — some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain.
But to lift the hoof!
For that you need
an idea.
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.
~Mary Oliver

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