There are some poems I return to again and again, and Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” is one of them.
It begins with the biggest questions: who made the world, the swan, the black bear? Then, almost straight away, it narrows down to one small grasshopper eating sugar out of the poet’s hand, washing her face, snapping her wings open and floating away.
That’s the medicine of this poem for me. Oliver says she doesn’t know exactly what a prayer is, but she does know how to pay attention. How to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields all day.
So much of the work we do on the Know Thyself course is exactly this. Slowing down. Noticing. Coming back into relationship with the animate earth, with the creatures, the seasons and our own bodies. Remembering that paying attention is itself a kind of prayer.
And then the poem ends with the question that stops me in my tracks every time:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver
Perhaps take a moment, take a pause, take a deep breath or two and let that question land. You don’t need to answer it today. Just notice what stirs.
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?