I am thinking of Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day. She asks good questions but I have to find my own answers. I looking around and around at the wonders of my world – the tulips, the raised garden beds, the green in the greenhouse, my messy table percolating with some many possibilities. And I have to say like Satchmo, What a wonderful world.
I’m wondering like the grasshopper what else I should be doing. Recognizing that life is finite, I do not want to squander my precious time on things of no importance and things that are not dear to me. Yes, everything die at last and too soon. I cannot fit everything in and I cannot ever get on top of everything. I’m pondering and choosing what to do with this one precious life that I have.
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 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?