There is a poem that I find myself coming back to again and again – Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” which she wrote in 1990.
As the season now changes from winter to spring, (and though it’s not yet summer), I am reminded to take notice of my immediate world and to be present in the world.
This practice of presence is an ancient practice and one that Jesus practiced in his life. He regularly took walks in the fields and noticed the flowers. He went up to the mountains and sat in silence. He went to the shoreline of the Lake and out on the lake at different times in the day. Jesus noticed the world in which he lived and his relationship with God’s creation.
He loved and served God and neighbor.
He lived his one wild and precious life faithfully.
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?
+ Mary Oliver
from “Devotions”, p. 316
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