Mary Oliver is one my favorite writers. She had a terrible childhood and rarely speaks or writes about it. Not directly. She doesn't share the content of her trauma. She shares how writing, outside of her home, and being out in nature, changed her life.
“I got saved by poetry,” she said. “I got saved by the beauty of the world.”
Did beauty become the counterbalance to the ugliness she saw early on? Before gratitude became trendy, Oliver was fortifying herself with beauty as a form of personal salvation. She wrote:
I don’t want to lose a single thread
from the intricate brocade of this happiness.
She shares her appreciation of every shred of happiness in compelling detail as though magnifying it for us all. She knows others are searching as well and serves us her words. She is a lantern lighter leading us through forests and forests. No matter how long or arduous the journey, the times we lose our shoes or nerves or loved ones, she is there pointing out a star, a flower, a bird or a dog.
More in Elephant Journal: http://www.elephantjournal.com...s-hunger-for-beauty/
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