Galiano Island: Spent most of the morning cleaning the small pond that sits between the house and the ocean view. It had become muddy and filled with algae. Water plants needed trimming and the overhanging California lilac had grown too thick for the light to come through. Now, with stored rainwater filling the basin and rays beaming past mogul pine and sage bushes, seven teenage goldfish are investigating their refurbished home.
Against all this, heaviness invades my heart. Can’t say why; the seasonal change perhaps, signalling impermanence and counting down the number of times I may yet live through beginnings and endings? Or regret … over how much I’ve taken for granting in this life, how rarely I’ve paid attention to the ordinary, naturally-occurring things around me? Who knows. Or a moment of clarity, of being awake to the fleeting nature of everything. So I sit, breathing in all this, quietly welcoming the sun’s soothing comfort. Mystery abounds.
“The Summer Day” © 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 washed her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t 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?
source: Oliver, M. (1992). New and selected poems. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 94.
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