It is an unusually warm November day. I’m wearing a light coat, but I’m not committed to it. A warm breeze travels across my hopeful face as I wait for the chronically late purple line train at the Howard station. A man pees onto the rails with confidence. 

Ah, nature is healing. 

Usually I am concerned by how warm it is this late into fall. Usually I am annoyed at how late the train is. Usually I struggle to hide my disgust at the sight of someone whipping it out for us while we wait to go to work. 

But this November I’ve been toting a copy of Upstream with me, a compilation of essays written by lauded American poet Mary Oliver. Suddenly the urban nightmare I call home looks a little more bucolic, has a little more ivy framing the edges of concrete.

As a child I quietly loved the indoors. I considered it fashionable for children to love to be outside, run around, get dirty. But I liked my books within the walls of my comfortable room with clean socks on, thank you very much. I did not want to admit that I secretly preferred the indoors where it was safe and quiet. 

My education on the majesty of the outdoors was very late. My alma mater boasts that the entire college campus is technically an arboretum. While this is true, there was a separate dedicated space, just adjacent to the main campus, of cultivated forest preserves that the college owned. This was “The Arboretum.” You never would have guessed that one. 

The Arboretum was a sanctuary, above all things. A place that functioned as a safe space from the watching eyes of a small campus community, and as a way to remember that we were not meant to just live in the walls of the old stone buildings like some kind of dark academia freaks. It was a place for walks, cries, picnics, music, trips (you know what I mean), budding romances, ending romances. My fondest memories of college are housed there, and it is what finally brought my socked feet barefoot to the earth. 

Above all it proved nature, with all its perils implied, could be a place of refuge.

If this is one life’s maxims, Oliver’s essays are an ode to it. This was a woman who lived body and soul in the trees, in the cold winter rivers, in the nests of robins. She was that child I wanted to be, who made fairy houses in the woods and whose parents would have to drag inside to sit down to supper. Maybe she remembers reprimands reminding her that she was a human being, and is supposed to be a young lady, at that. 

Oliver imbues absolute magic in the crevices of nature you would least expect. Her words on migrations of birds, of fishing, are so taut with feeling and wonder that you wonder if a very precocious child wrote her words. You can tell this woman never lost her sense of awe, rather, it lived alongside her sense of ease in years romping out of doors.

Inextricably linked with these feelings are her essays on writers: Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and a short anecdote on Wordsworth. I have read the works of these writers before but I felt even more drawn to them, with my backdrop being the previous essays on nature walks and findings. Emerson was always a figure in history textbooks, “one of the fathers of Transcendentalism,” but Oliver wrote with such tenderness about him that I felt I knew him, and we were sitting by his fireplace together. Maybe we had a warm mug of tea and an old biscuit.

Oliver’s command of language is such that she almost never loses me; every word is so deliberately chosen that I cannot help but deliberately take in each word (I mean, she is a poet afterall). There are times where she is so enraptured and so wound around the little finger of a moment that I realize my concentration is starting to slip. Maybe it’s my own intrusive thoughts on strictly human concerns of bills and self worth. Maybe it’s the man blasting reggae music on the train at 7:30am. She was losing me a bit when she spoke of the turtles and how she took some of their eggs to eat. I don’t Mary, maybe we should leave them be. 

But I am not calling Mary to dinner and telling her to act like a lady. I can tell her spirit could not be contained by anything or anyone that was strictly focused on the manmade elements. She lived for what was out there, what could still be discovered, what nature could provide for us. And I think nature can provide something like a warm, loving hug. I certainly got that from reading this. A warm hug and a walk with a friend in the woods. 

Now how to take that with me on the morning commute all the time…