43 pages • 1-hour read
Upstream: Selected Essays
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Themes
The Discipline of Being Different
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. She describes books as companions that opened alternative worlds, ones that felt more real to her than the regulated world of school. Her reading habits were a disciplined practice of aligning herself with voices who lived outside convention: Whitman, Emerson, Wordsworth, Poe. Her devotion to these writers is part of her training in difference, a preparation for the creative solitude required of poets. To love what is outside the ordinary is itself an act of resistance.
Nature, in Oliver’s essays, becomes the great tutor of difference. Every creature—fox, turtle, owl—follows its own instinctive path without apology. Oliver admires beings who grow and move according to their nature, even when that nature confuses or frightens humans. Her close attention to these animals shows her learning from them that the world is full of creatures who do not fit human frameworks and do not try to. This observation helps Oliver justify her own strangeness. To be different is not to be broken; it is to be alive in the way that wild things are alive. Maintaining one’s difference therefore becomes a moral discipline, a commitment to authenticity even when that authenticity isolates or challenges.
By the time Oliver writes about Provincetown in the book’s final essay, the discipline of being different has matured into an ethic of belonging without conformity. Provincetown is a community of people whose livelihoods resist predictability—fishermen who return to dangerous waters, immigrants who build new traditions, artists and wanderers drawn to the margins of the map. Oliver’s sense of home emerges from being accepted as someone who stands apart rather than from blending in. She does not try to become like the fishermen or long-time residents; instead, she is folded into the town’s fabric precisely because she maintains her singular, observing presence. Difference, when disciplined, can create its own form of connection.
The Kinship of All Wild Things
Oliver repeatedly returns to a single conviction: That the human world and the natural world are not separate realms but members of the same great family. This belief is not sentimental. It emerges from decades of patient watching, walking, grieving, and praising—a lived philosophy grounded in the sobering, often brutal realities of nature. Oliver thus advocates for the kinship of all wild things.
For Oliver, kinship means accepting that our fates, joys, wounds, and responsibilities intertwine with the smallest and most overlooked beings. She distills this worldview with clarity: “[T]here exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else […] The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family […] there is no […] sense in honoring […] a few things, and then closing the list” (154). This statement becomes the thematic heart of the book—a declaration that kinship with the natural world is not optional, but foundational to being.
Oliver’s essays are structured around encounters, moments when she pauses long enough to notice the life around her and recognize herself in it. Whether she is watching a fox, studying an owl, or observing a turtle moving with ancient deliberation, she sees not just an animal but an echo of human desire, fear, hunger, or serenity. These parallels are not anthropomorphic; rather, they reveal her belief that the emotional and instinctive lives of creatures mirror our own more than we tend to admit. When Oliver witnesses the terror in the owl’s cry or the turtle’s slow and earnest persistence, she understands these behaviors as reflections of the same forces driving her: The urge to survive, to explore, to retreat, to try again. In this sense, each animal becomes a mentor. Through them, Oliver learns that wildness—raw, unfiltered being—is a common inheritance.
This sense of kinship extends beyond creatures to environments themselves. Oliver treats landscapes as living presences, such as the pond, the forest, the marsh, the shoreline. Even the little house she builds becomes a space of unity and meaning. She enters these spaces with reverence because she recognizes their role in shaping her life, her poems, and her understanding of the world. When she walks through a stand of trees or along a field at dawn in winter, she does so with the awareness that her own aliveness is inseparable from these places. She is not an observer at the edge of nature but a participant within it.
Ultimately, Oliver argues that recognizing the kinship of all wild things imposes an ethical demand, as humans must honor the full web of life, not merely the parts they find beautiful or useful. To ignore this connection is to misunderstand the nature of being. To embrace it is to live with greater humility, gratitude, and courage. In Upstream, kinship becomes both a spiritual insight and a practical guide—a reminder that to honor the mud at our feet and the farthest star is to understand our place within an infinite, living family.
Attention as Responsible Practice
One of the most consistent arguments Mary Oliver advances is that deep attention—slow, deliberate, and reverent—is not merely a way of seeing the world but a way of living responsibly within it. For Oliver, attention is an ethical stance, a discipline that shapes how one relates to nature, to language, and to one’s own inner life. Her devotion to the natural world arises from this long practice of attending to it with care, humility, and presence.
In a moment that captures her philosophy with clarity and warmth, Oliver reflects on her childhood escape into the woods: “For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight” (151). In these lines, attention becomes a return to responsibility—a movement toward the place where she feels most fully alive and most capable of perceiving the truth of things.
Oliver’s essays repeatedly show that the practice of attention begins in stillness. She does not rush through landscapes, she lingers. She watches the fox long enough to recognize something shared—its caution, its curiosity, its quick, bright alertness. She studies the turtle until she understands not only its slow, unwavering motion but what that motion reveals about perseverance and instinct. Her commitment to observation reflects her belief that attention is a form of respect: It honors the life of the other creature by fully acknowledging its presence, its strangeness, and its right to exist. When she attends to a creature, she does not try to control or interpret it too swiftly. Instead, she allows it to be itself, and in doing so she accepts the natural world on its own terms.
In later essays, Oliver shows how attention functions not only as a private discipline but as a way of understanding community. She notices the details others might overlook: The missing fingers of the fishermen, the sound of the boat engines returning at dusk, the ritual of the men gathering outside the New York Store. These observations reveal her tenderness for the people around her, and her recognition that their lives—like the tides—reflect rhythms, risks, and devotions that demand to be honored. By attending to them with the same care she gives to the natural world, she acknowledges the dignity and struggle embedded in their daily labor.
Ultimately, Oliver’s idea of attention as responsible practice suggests that looking closely is a way of living truthfully. When she steps into the delight of attention, she returns to the place where she can see most clearly. Attention grounds her; it clarifies the interdependence between herself and the world. Through this practice, she becomes more thoughtful, more humane, and more attuned to the preciousness of all living things. In Upstream, attention is devotion itself, a way of living with integrity by refusing to look away.
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