Examples Of Mary Oliver In Living Like Weasel

Her eyes were a deep brown, several shades darker than her fur. Her ears were perked high, twitching at the crackling of branches in the distance. She maintained perfect eye contact with me. It was like looking in a mirror. Her face was narrow, long and brown. I didn’t blink, and she didn’t blink. I didn’t move, and she didn’t move. Moments before, she had galloped across my path, up the side of the woods and spun around to face me. Our eyes were level and steady. She was beautiful. I wonder what was going through her mind? My mind went straight to “Do, a deer, a female deer.” Mary Oliver in “Humpbacks” and Annie Dillard in “Living like Weasels” have thought provoking encounters like mine. Why are these encounters so important to our lives

She became one with the weasel and described the looks they were exchanging as if they were “two lovers” or “deadly enemies”. This is interesting because Oliver and the weasel obviously can’t verbally communicate so she deciphers the look he is giving her as both positive and negative. Dillard creates this imagery of how connected she was with the weasel to try and connect the reader to the weasel too. Like a chain, Dillard found a part of herself in the weasel, just like the readers find some of themselves in

Both of them tried to answer the question “What is water?” Wallace says, “The Capital-T Truth is about life before death.” This is everyone’s Truth. Wallace is saying that we should find our individual Truth’s by connecting with others. Dillard and Oliver both find their Truth when they are looking at the animals and connecting with life. They realize that life is bigger than just groceries and traffic; life is going into nature and seeing that people are not the only things that matter in the world. Nature connects us to things that are bigger than we are. We use nature to escape from our hectic routines, but the routines are what make us human. Both animals and humans have routines based on survival, like getting food, however our methods differ greatly. When we see how animals live and how different they are from us, it reminds us that we are animals too, but that we have the ability to see ourselves from the perspective that we are all small creatures coexisting in life together and nothing can change that. This is why having personal encounters with animals is important; because they remind us that the world does not revolve around us and that we all exist for a short period of time in this