Sleeping in the Forest

by Mary Oliver

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 river bed,
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.

from Sleeping In The Forest by Mary Oliver

I used to take my daughters camping in the mountains when they were younger, but now I live in a lovely forest in the same mountains and have no need to camp. Can you relate to this poem? Have you ever slept in a forest? As always, I’d love to hear from you.

“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.” –Marianne Moore

“Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry. My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” –Dylan Thomas

“I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” -Denise Levertov

“Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.” Dylan Thomas

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.  Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.  -Carl Sandburg 

“If I were in solitary confinement, I’d never write another novel, and probably not keep a journal, but I’d write poetry, because poems, you see, are between God and me.” -May Sarton

“Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective.” – Mary Oliver

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.  -Robert Graves 

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
-Emily Dickinson

“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” May Sarton

Poetry is life distilled.  -Gwendolyn Brooks

Poets are like magicians, searching for magical phrases to pull rabbits out of people’s souls.  -Terri Guillemets

Do you have a favorite quote or a favorite poet? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

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Thousands of Golden Sting Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.

Gliding silently beneath the waves, they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale sharks.

For me, these photos serve as a giant Rorschach test. I not only see stingrays, in all their wild magnificence, but I see pages and pages of manuscripts just under the surface of the unconscious finding their way to writers everywhere—a mass migration of creativity and new ideas traveling to search out agreeable agents, publishers and readers. Our job, as writers, poets, playwrights, et al, is to honor our “wild” creations and the wildly creative side of ourselves.

As Mary Oliver said so well when describing a different migrating species:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You have only to let the soft animal of your body

            love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

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Like many of you, I collect quotes that I love. I think we collect quotes like we collect fragments of ourselves. They help remind us who we are.These are my top 5 picks for this year:

• Do one thing every day that scares you. –Eleanor Roosevelt

• It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there –William Carlos Williams

• The seed cannot sprout upwards without simultaneously sending roots into the ground. –Proverb from an ancient Egyptian temple

• For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. –Mary Oliver

• Not only the thirsty seek the water, the water as well seeks the thirsty. –Rumi

What are your top 5? Or what is your favorite quote for today?

If you feel like sharing, please leave them on the comments page of this blog post. Please note: if you subscribe through Feedburner, you will need to go to the site to make a comment. Thanks!  www.susangabriel.com/blog.