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A review by erileyu
Dog Songs by Mary Oliver
5.0
Some of my favorite excerpts:
For when he lay down to enter sleep he did not argue about whether or not God made him.
“I like everything a lot, every day."
Well, see? Just keep on liking things.
And praying.
"I don't know anything about that."
Yes you do. Every time you wake up and love your life and the world, you're praying, my dear boy. I'm sure of it.
The moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think about time and space, makes me take measure of myself: one iota pondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. As though I were just as wonderful as the perfect moon.
But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.
For when he lay down to enter sleep he did not argue about whether or not God made him.
“I like everything a lot, every day."
Well, see? Just keep on liking things.
And praying.
"I don't know anything about that."
Yes you do. Every time you wake up and love your life and the world, you're praying, my dear boy. I'm sure of it.
The moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think about time and space, makes me take measure of myself: one iota pondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. As though I were just as wonderful as the perfect moon.
But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.