Lessons from Mary Oliver (American Poet 1935 - 2019)

12 × 16 Acrylic on Canvas by Donna Skonning 2025

“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 it neither power nor time.”

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eyes watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily hate atone. Privacy then. A place apart - peace, to chew on pencils, to scribble and erase, and scribble again.

By Mary Oliver “Of Power and Time” 2016 page 23