Musings Along Life's Way: The Summer Day

Here's a poem that I hope you will enjoy. The title is The Summer Day and it is by Mary Oliver. It is one of my favorite poems.

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?

All summer we have been studying the parables of Jesus -- stories that Jesus told in order to lead us more deeply into an experience of presence, into what he referred to as the kingdom of Gold. A good poem can do that same thing. Take this one -- it starts off with the big question, "Who made the world?" It doesn't get any bigger than that. But like a distiller of fine spirits, Oliver boils it down to the very specific grasshopper eating her lunch out of the poet's hand. Oliver pays very close attention to this grasshopper and shifts the conversation -- for that is what this poem is -- to the act of paying attention itself and to its attendant graces. To pay attention is to knell down in the grass, to be idle (relaxed attention not strong fixed attention) and blessed. And she takes it out of the abstract once again -- she, Mary, has been strolling all day "through the fields." All this is Mary Oliver's answer to that initial question, "Who made the world," or put another way, what is the meaning of life?" "Tell me," she asks in the specific, "what else should I have done?" Then she throws it back, what about you, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Oliver calls us to our specific lives -- the grasshoppers, the plants, one step in front of another along life's way. It is here, she is suggesting that one finds the answers to life's big questions by just living. The parables do this too. Jesus talks of mustard seeds, pearls, and leaven as was to enter the Presence. Our task is to bring them to life.

It is summer time, and the living is easy -- enjoy your one wild and precious life.

Blessings,
David