Sense of Oneness with the Natural World

Dear Mary,

We have never met, but you will always be dear Mary to me because of how profoundly you have touched not only my life but also the countless others with whom I have shared your poems.

I am sure that many people who come to your poems are first drawn by a shared appreciation of nature, but you take your readers to another place, where there is a sense of oneness with that natural world, of 
belonging, and of the eternal longing to belong.

When I think of your poems, I close my eyes and see the birds you have followed, the dog, the marsh pond, the mud and the muck, the sound of tides.

You have influenced not only my work, but my being, in the deepest possible way:  You showed me how to look harder, listen more closely, be more attuned. You have shown me how inevitable, and possibly 
necessary, fear is, and how important it is to go past fear. And you also showed me how gorgeous it is just to fall in love with the world,  over and over again. How replenishing to our souls.

So many of us have fallen in love with the world because your poems opened up a path, and we carry them in our hearts always.

Dominique Browning