Tell me what is it you plan to do…?
Jennifer receiving Thai Yoga Therapy, taken by Matece Skow, June 2022.
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 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 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?
-Mary Oliver
Does Mary Oliver’s poem bring anyone else to tears?
On the most normal of feeling days when it seems as if every emotion is in check and there couldn’t be one reason why you would feel the need to cry.
On my most well put together days, this poem can bring me and everything around me to a full stop. It isn’t until moments later that I realize by the movement of tears behind my eyes that nothing actually stopped, I was just awarded the blessing of being fully present.
The Summer Day, really holds meaning for me as the summer winds down and I reflect on the things that define this summer for me or at least the ways it will go down in my writings and history.
After a dim spring that included, opening myself up to the feelings that were washing over me, self-reflection, and learning how important it was to stay present, a summer, well…
A summer where I quite literally faced the question, What will I do with my one wild and precious life?
Wild Fern or Wild Honey, I think both. Wild heart and wild hair, leading the way. Here is where I have planted, and I use that term loosely because this is a beautiful start but just like a fern I will continue to cultivate and grow wild and free, dispersed by the wind.
