Tuesday, January 24, 2017

BOOK SPECIAL ... Overall Favorite Books of 2016

BOOK SPECIAL  Overall

 Favorite Books of 2016

3.UPSTREAM
To read Mary Oliver is to be read by her — to be made real by her words, to have the richest subterranean truths of your own experience mirrored back to you with tenfold the luminosity. Her prose collection Upstream: Selected Essays is a book of uncommon enchantment, containing Oliver’s largehearted wisdom on writing, creative work, and the art of life.
In one particularly satisfying piece from the volume, titled Of Power and Time,” Oliver writes:
The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.
[…]
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
For a richer taste of this feast for the mind, heart, and spirit, see Oliver on how books saved her life and time, the artist’s task, and the central commitment of the creative life.

BRAIN PICKINGS

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