To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. - Mary Oliver

Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety — best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light — good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

quickly found for myself two such blessings — the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.