If you hear the call, you have to answer

 The poet Mary Oliver kept her wants simple and made it a point to hold undemanding jobs to pay the bills. She focused her best efforts on her poetry, not on earning a living.

She wrote: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Yesterday’s note was about the creative process, about how the difficulties of life almost demand some kind of expression in creative work. Oliver’s warning about those who hear the call but don’t answer it rings true to me. 

• Source: Mary Oliver is known as a poet, but she should also be known for her essays. The quotation comes from “Of Power and Time,” which was collected in Upstream: Selected Essays.

For a note on Mary Oliver’s famous list of things she could do without, see Jan. 6.