One summer afternoon I heard a looming, mysterious hum high in the air; then came something like a small planet flying past — something not at all interested in me but on its own way somewhere, all anointed with excitement: bees, swarming, not to be held back. Nothing could hold them back. The grass singing as it sipped up the summer rain. The owl in the darkness, that good darkness under the stars. Some wounds never vanish. Yet little by little I learned to love my life. Though sometimes I had to run hard — especially from melancholy — not to be held back. The mystery of the night. The hummingbird’s wings. The excitement of thunder. The rainbow in the waterfall. Wild mustard, that rough blaze of the fields. Also the words of poets a hundred or hundreds of years dead — their words that would not be held back.
Mary Oliver, from "Hum, Hum" in A Thousand Mornings
