Upstream: Selected Essays

In Section 2, Mary Oliver refines a worldview shaped by intentional divergence, profound kinship with the nonhuman world, and an ethic of attention rooted in responsibility. Her reflections on fishing, ponds, turtles, and the interplay of appetite and empathy reveal a writer who sees the natural world as an active teacher.

One of these lessons is The Discipline of Being Different. Oliver’s sense of difference is never merely personal eccentricity; it is a disciplined choice to orient herself against the grain of cultural norms that prioritize dominance and consumption. This discipline becomes clear in the essay recounting a day spent fishing with her partner, Molly Malone Cook. The two women discover they have been using the wrong bait in the wrong place, yet the absence of success brings them relief rather than disappointment. They feel no frustration about going home empty-handed; instead, the lack of a catch confirms a preference for observing rather than taking. This decision not to desire what the activity traditionally promises reveals Oliver’s deeper impulse to resist forms of appetite that diminish her sense of connection.

This commitment surfaces again when she watches young men rush toward a shark with sticks. The scene contrasts sharply with the restraint she herself regularly practices. Instead of treating the appearance of a large predator as an invitation to assert control, she sends the men away and restores the quiet tension of the moment. The shark, like the duck she rescued earlier, becomes a figure calling her away from aggressive impulses that many might take for granted. Oliver’s difference lies in her refusal to respond with fear or dominance; she continually chooses the posture that protects rather than conquers. Even in small actions—such as releasing sand eels she finds inside a caught fish—she refuses the familiar path. Where others might see bait, she sees life still capable of wriggling back into the water.

This cultivated difference is shaped by Oliver’s sense of The Kinship of All Wild Things. The animals that populate these essays—fish, ducks, turtles, frogs, herons, geese—are neighbors whose movements form the calendar by which she measures the year. In “The Ponds,” the landscape around Beech Forest becomes a community defined by seasonal rhythms: Pickerel rising in spring, snapping turtles surfacing in April, herons appearing in their appointed months. A family of goslings climbs over her as though she is simply another element of the shoreline. The passage of time here is not chronological but creaturely. Oliver experiences this world as one in which she is embedded rather than one she oversees. Her kinship is not romanticized; it is observational and embodied, marked by recognition that each animal plays a role in a system larger than individual lives.

The turtles in “Sister Turtle” expand this sense of kinship by inviting Oliver into the cycle of appetite and reproduction that governs their lives. She watches female turtles leave the pond to search for nesting grounds, aware that her presence may disrupt the fragile timing of their labor. She experiences their annual emergence with mixed emotion—delight at encountering them, anxiety about influencing their success. Even when she later returns to the nest and removes half the eggs to eat them, she does so with both respect and sorrow. The act is not taken lightly, as it reinforces her belief that humans are not separate from the cycles of taking and giving that govern animal life. The earth feeds its creatures, and creatures feed the earth, in a web of relationship she sees herself belonging to without exemption.

At the center of these kinship scenes lies Attention as Responsible Practice, the activity that allows her to inhabit difference and kinship responsibly. Attention, for Oliver, is both alertness and service—a readiness to perceive the miraculous in moments that appear mundane. When she discovers the live sand eels inside the blue fish’s stomach, it is her attentiveness that enables her to notice that several are intact and still moving. Without that moment of seeing, the small lives would simply have been discarded. Instead, attention becomes a prompt to act, an immediate reminder that the world continually offers chances to respond with care. This kind of looking demands patience, stillness, and a willingness to let one’s own needs recede long enough to perceive the needs of others.

In “The Ponds,” attention suspends Oliver’s experience of time. Watching the familiar creatures that return each season, she finds herself lifted out of the linear progression of hours and instead placed within the cyclical time of the landscape. The fox that appears in summer and lies down to sleep despite the nearby geese demonstrates how attention opens a space where wildness is gently coexistent. The fox is neither threat nor spectacle; it is simply another presence in a shared world. Such perceptions arise only when Oliver slows herself to match the pace of the place she occupies.

Taken together, these essays reveal a vision of life founded on the interdependence of difference, kinship, and attention. Oliver’s willingness to resist cultural norms, her devotion to the creatures who share her landscape, and her rigorous practice of seeing form a cohesive ethic. Through the wild world, she learns not only how to live but how to live responsibly—aware of her appetites, attuned to the lives around her, and willing to answer the world’s continual invitations with humility and care.