Summering Upstream with Mary Oliver
Knowing what to do with my "one wild and precious life"
Slowly this summer I’ve been savoring Mary Oliver’s book of essays Upstream while sitting on my patio sipping sweet wine, breathing in the soft-scented air, admiring the green mosaic of oak leaves scattered against the deep blue bowl above. Admiring too the way the light swirls with the breeze across the bath-warm pool I’ll soon be gliding through, parting its silky folds as I swim suspended in space.
I know how to be “idle and blessed.”
I know what to do with my “one wild and precious life.”
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
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?