experience! experience!—with the rain, and the trees, and all their
kindred—has brought me a comfort and a modesty and a devotion to
inclusiveness that I would not give up for all the gold in all the
mountains of the world. this I knew, as I grew from simple delight
toward thought and into conviction: such beauty as the earth offers must
hold great meaning. so I begin to consider the world as emblematic as
well as real, and saw that it was—that shining word—virtuous. that it
offers us, as surely as the wheat and the lilies grow, the dream of
virtue.
I think of this every day. I think of it when I meet the turtle with
its patient green face, or hear the hawk's tin-tongued skittering cry,
or watch the otters at play in the pond. I am blood and bone however
that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own
thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or
smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant,
ferocious, loving, life-shaping.
: mary oliver, ‘comfort’; long life: essays and other writings
