Our wild and precious lives

The Summer Day

 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

 

 

My knowledge and appreciation of poetry doesn't extend much beyond college freshman English, but occasionally I glance at a poem -- say in the New Yorker -- read it, and read it again, and realize that it grabs me at some level.  I'd never heard of Mary Oliver, who died this month at the age of 83.  I first heard of her last Friday, in fact, when my parish's pastor quoted the above poem -- one of her most famous, I now learn -- in its entirety, in his weekly email message.

 On January 17, as the world was preoccupied with the dissembling of the American President and the weeping of separated children, with American bombs exploding in Yemen and teachers preparing to strike in Los Angeles, Mary Oliver, one of the greatest of these new Desert Mothers, died quietly in her home in Florida.

In a moving tribute not only to Mary Oliver, but to poets in general, he compared their mission with that of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, of the hermits and mystics, in centuries past.

In this beautiful little poem, Oliver consciously and intentionally withdraws from the general or theoretical—“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is”—choosing instead simply to encounter the world in its particular reality. It is not bears or grasshoppers about whom she speaks, but the bear and this grasshopper, whom she can see and hear and watch and feel. And through this encounter with reality, rather than through theology or spirituality, she enters into the mysteries of death and life, and the summoning question given to all who live not as ideas or concepts, but—like the grasshopper or the black bear—in the irreducible mystery of the existing world.

Even after reading this tribute, I thought perhaps Ms. Oliver wasn't really all that well known -- after all I myself had never heard of her.

And yet, I was humbled to note that the news of her death was carried in all the newspapers.  Today's New York Times carries an In Memoriam at the bottom of the first page of its arts section, providing her years of life, 1935-2019, and quoting the final line of "The Summer Day":

Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?

That question led the pastor into his greetings and congratulations to the young people of our parish who had been confirmed last week, and to pose to them the same question:

May each of the young people confirmed this Saturday live well and lovingly … and filled with the power of wonder and love. May each hear the voice of that Desert Mother, who invites them, invites all of us, to be about our work: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

And it leads us all, young and old, to consider how best to spend the remaining years, days, hours -- however many or few they might be -- of our own "wild and precious" lives.