Suze Muses
Every step I take. Every connection I make. All of my beloveds. The sunshine of summer. Swimming wherever and whenever I can. My friend Dewey said it yesterday after he told us about losing his dear friend, Dave. “There is no tomorrow.” Mary Oliver asks the question in her beautiful poem, The Summer Day ~ “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Even though I walk without a true partner of the heart and soul and I have lost many earthly beloveds, I am grateful to still have the chance to choose. I am alive. I am alive.
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
Gratitude Thursday Writing Prompt ~ Are you truly grateful to be on the planet? If yes, then why? If not, then what is weighing you down? What has you longing to be anywhere but here?