One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice—

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,

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black b… Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out…

She steps into the dark swamp where the long wait ends. The secret slippery package drops to the weeds. She leans her long neck and tongue…

At Blackwater Pond the tossed wat… after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls…

Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. It is heaven-sent. It flows through me like the blue wave.

On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside to think about God – a worthy pastime.

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light,

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hum… equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there t… Here the clam deep in the speckled…

Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun,

From a single grain they have mult… When you look in the eyes of one you have seen them all. At the edges of highways they pick at limp things.

Last night in the fields I lay down in the darkness to think about death, but instead I fell asleep,

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her poc… full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone o…

Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born. The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of…

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your kn… for a hundred miles through the de… You only have to let the soft anim… love what it loves.