mary oliver, you are so talented. truly a poet that just IS, never tries and always delivers for me. this book put me in a calm headspace whenever i reached for it (especially during flights), her relationship with creativity and nature is so pure. for some reason, i really loved 'who cometh here?' — happy to imagine a bear being a regular citizen of the world one day — as well as the shoutout to portuguese towns and fishermen, the consistent callbacks that interconnect certain essays and obviously her impressive vocabulary throughout. it did, at times, get a little too academic: i didn't feel fully immersed in the section about authors, their small biographies and how their lives shaped their work but, even then, i was still down (and i'm happy to now know mr. whitman was queer!)

p.s: i have chosen to ignore the dreaded cat paragraph, i don't know her like that