“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.” ~ Mary Oliver

The sun came out today and I got to begin the day running by the water with my friend. I am so happy and thankful. By the end, however, I am also worn out. So why not share one of my other favorites - one who really got nature and saw so so much life in it - Mary Oliver - to encourage us all. Cheers!

“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.” ~ Mary Oliver

Ponds

Every year the lilies are so perfect I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding the black, mid-summer ponds.

Nobody could count all of them—the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild. But what in this world is perfect?

I bend closer and see how this one is clearly lopsided—and that one wears an orange blight—and this one is a glossy cheek half nibbled away—and that one is a slumped purse full of it own unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe that I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

~Mary Oliver, in House of Light