What I was born for

Mindful

Every day

I see or I hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

– Mary Oliver

9 thoughts on “What I was born for”

  1. One of my all-time favorite Oliver poems. Can never get the phrase “the untrimmable light of the world” out of my head. Thank you for posting on this fall weekend.

  3. Coming home from my run, where I was surrounded by the beautiful of autumn leaves, above me and under me, I couldn’t help but tear up at this poem, thinking, so that’s what I felt.

    Thank you for sharing this, Lindsey. What a lovely way to start my day.

  7. Lindsey,
    I’m discovering you have another shared love of a poet.

    Mary’s most recent book just arrived yesterday “A Thousand Mornings”. Here are the final lines from her poem “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness”: “So let us go on, cheerfully enough, this and every crisping day, though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed.”

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