Upstream: Selected Essays

From the first pages of Upstream, Mary Oliver frames a life of attentiveness, solitude, and artistic integrity as one that must be lived against the grain. Difference is a discipline—a chosen, practiced stance, and she celebrates it across her collection.

Her opening essay offers a literal and symbolic enactment of this stance. When she wanders upstream, walking in the opposite direction of her parents, Oliver demonstrates that deviation from the expected path is not merely disobedience but a form of discovery: “I was walking the wrong way, upstream instead of downstream. Finally I was advertised on the hotline of help, and yet there I was, slopping along happily in the stream’s coolness. So maybe it was the right way after all” (5). This moment becomes an emblem of what she must—and will—choose for the rest of her life: The courage to diverge, the willingness to be misunderstood, and the discipline to remain faithful to an inner calling rather than external demands.

Oliver develops this theme across her essays by showing how differentness, once chosen, requires maintenance. Her childhood decision is not a one-time turning, it is the beginning of a pattern. She continually seeks spaces where she can resist the noise of ordinary expectations—fields, forests, ponds, small houses made of mud and twigs—places where her interior life can grow without the pressures of conformity.