"With your one wild and precious life"

As we welcome a beautiful Oregon summer this week, enjoy these words from Pulitzer Prize-

winning poet Mary Oliver:

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?

Maybe the best prayer is to start by paying attention, falling down into the grass and remembering what it means to be idle and blessed. Oliver calls us, as Jesus did, to step into our days with our eyes wide open, our minds alert, and our hearts grateful for the intricacy and majesty of God’s creation around us. To hear Oliver read “The Summer Day,” click here. Here she is again in her poem “Sometimes”:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

How will you pay attention today, how will you be astonished, and whom will you tell?

May you be astonished this week by the majesty of God’s creation, by the peace of the Holy

Spirit, and by the presence of the living Savior.

Jennie