Sleeping in the forest

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

-- Mary Oliver

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

Enter Within

The clearest way
into
the Universe
is
through a
forest wilderness.

-- John Muir,
John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
(1938) | page 313
(arranged quote)