Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function — to excite the viewers toward sublime thou… - Mary Oliver

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to bee melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as
your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and
unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.

whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.

And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness — of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.