My Great Ones

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In Mary Oliver's Upstream (page 57).  This reminds me of Nick Hornby's "My People."  Both are a kind of "my personal Mt. Rushmore."  Oliver's conception is so rich with nuance.  

For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question— never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.

So here I am, walking on down the sandy path, with my wild body, with the inherited devotions of curiosity and respect. The moment is full of such exquisite interest as Fabre or Flaubert would have been utterly alive to. 

Yes, it is a din of voices that I hear, and they do not all say the same thing. But the fit of thoughtfulness unites them. 

Who are they? For me they are Shelley, and Fabre, and Wordsworth-the young Wordsworth-and Barbara Ward, and Blake, and Basho, Maeterlinck and Jastrow, and sweetest Emerson, and Carson, and Aldo Leopold. 

Forebears, models, spirits whose influence and teachings I am now inseparable from, and forever grateful for. I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life, with them I enter the event, I mold the meditation, I keep if I can some essence of the hour, even as it slips away. And I do not accomplish this alert and loving confrontation by myself and alone, but through terrifying and continual effort, and with this innumerable, fortifying company, bright as stars in the heaven of my mind. 

Were they seed eaters? Were they meat eaters? Not the point. They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace, easygoing here, ferociously unmovable there; they were thoughtful. A few voices, strict and punctilious, like Shelley's, like Thoreau's, cry out: Change! Change! But most don't say that; they simply say: Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too. Teilhard de Chardin was not talking about how to escape anguish, but about how to live with it.

Hornby says: 

the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work. I have scores of people like that, influences and role models and heroes....I won't go into detail about what they have all meant to me: sometimes it was their taste, sometimes their thinking, or their soul, or attention to detail, or audacity, or comic timing, or arrogance, or commitment, or bravery, or the way they have lived their lives.