The Journey
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.
~ Mary Oliver
Though she attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, Oliver never received a degree. She left school, in part, because she felt ready to write on her own. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her third book, American Primitive , in 1984.
Shortly after winning her Pulitzer, Oliver described her routine as follows: “I simply do not distinguish between work and play.”
(poem and exerpts from The Power of Experience: Great Writers over 50 on the Quest for a Lifetime of Meaning, edited by Jeremy James.)
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