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Touched By Beauty
It’s the birthday of poet Mary Oliver, born in Maple Heights, Ohio (1935)….
Oliver said: “I was very careful never to take an interesting job….I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it….
She published five books of poetry, and still almost no one had heard of her. She doesn’t remember ever having given a reading before 1984, which is the year that she was doing dishes one evening when the phone rang and it was someone calling to tell her that her most recent book, American Primitive (1983), had won the Pulitzer Prize….She didn’t really like the fame …didn’t want to be in the news.
When editors called their house for Oliver, Cook would answer, announce that she was going to get Oliver, fake footsteps, and then get back on the phone and pretend to be the poet — all so that Oliver didn’t have to talk on the phone to strangers…
— Nancy Muir Yeaw
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“When you can become little enough, naked enough, and honest enough, then you will ironically find that you are more than enough. At this place of poverty and freedom, you have nothing to prove and nothing to protect. Here you can connect with everything and everyone. Everything belongs.”
— Richard Rohr
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