Who said one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet whose work is celebrated for its profound connection to the natural world. Known for her observant, accessible and deeply spiritual style, she spent decades walking the shores and woods of Provincetown, Massachusetts, translating the quiet movements of wildlife and weather into universal meditations on existence. 

Her poems continue to inspire millions to find the sacred in the everyday.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

When it's over, I want to say—

All my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. 

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

You do not have to be good. 

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.  You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. 

Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. 

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem—)

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

And I say to my heart—

Rave on.

I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall—what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice― 

Excuse me, I have work to do.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things―to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it―and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice―though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do―determined to save the only life you could save. 

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. 

I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. 

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. 

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. 

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields. 

Watch now how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

Things take the time they take. Do not worry. How many roads did St Augustine follow before he became St Augustine?

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work many times, but the work of the soul is always.

Stillness is the only thing in this world that has no skeleton.

Listen—Are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some madness of setting some part of myself free by looking at the world.

My work is loving the world.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing, that the light is everything.