There’s a dizzy field of sunflowers and all the other blossoms she honors and surrenders to. And a thread of Noah, the oak tree she named and whom she kisses on the first day of every spring. There’s the strand of the river she follows upstream, which is sometimes frozen icy blue. She pours into the rich cauldron of her essays everything she encounters, or that encounters her. All with the vulnerability of being truly human. Oliver’s lilting prose traverses the several layers of ‘looking deeply’ with the playfulness of a child, the graceful sharpness of a master painter, and the desire to understand of an utterly sincere scholar. Upstream, Selected Essays by Mary Oliver lays down in a thousand compelling ways that one most essential truth of life: To live is to give life, and everything that flows in it, your fullest and deepest attention. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
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