A Summer to Ponder
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This summer is going to look different this year. But let’s take our cue from Mary Oliver’s “Summer Day”. This delicious poem reminds us that all of life can be wild with prayerful repose if we just stop and take notice of the glory radiating all around.
It’s a Love-soaked world and we’re being drenched every day.
Join me in gazing (and being gazed at) by animating force of Life and Love that is pulsing in every living thing, and all is gift…if we have eyes to see.
Start by taking time to read and meditate on this poem.
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
