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
From ‘The Summer Day’
Is paying attention a form of prayer, an observance of the sacred surround? From a certain vantage point, a poet finds everything holy.
“Who made the world?” Oliver wonders at the outset of her poem, “The Summer Day,” implying the answer to that question might be a “who,” though she doesn’t say. She merely asks.
She claims not to know how to pray, exactly, but does know how to pay attention to the world around her. Being idle is part of her skillset, and strolling through the fields all day long. She doesn’t genuflect in a church; she kneels in the grass, falls down into it. She doesn’t just look at the world, she dives in. Sensual. Pleasurable. Maybe that’s why she feels blessed — and free.
Essentially, this is what Mary Oliver did for a living while she was alive. She was an inhabitant of the here and now. She lived in the present all day long. She wandered, found things, took notes, wrote beautiful verse based on what she paid attention to. She was good at it. Gifted. Blessed. And so are we who read the results of her “labors.”
On this particular summer day, after marveling at a grasshopper in her hand, she seems to anticipate those who might be thinking, “Is that all?” That’s what writers do — anticipate reactions to what they write. Summoning a dialogue with readers.
Mary challenges her imagined critics: “Tell me,” she says, a little defensively, “what else should I have done?” suggesting that there is no better use of her time than paying attention to a world where everything, including herself, dies too soon. Grasshoppers die before us, but we will follow, including those Mary loved in a special way. Her partner, her dogs.
And if you insist there is a better use of time, she wants to know about it — at the very least wants all of us to think about it.
“Tell me,” she asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Has a more useful question ever been asked in any poem? How will you live the only life you will ever have?
Is life precious? Wild? Untamable? Are you paying close attention to it? Is your plan to make the best use of your talents and gifts? Mary Oliver’s gift was living in the moment, finding the beauty around her and sharing it with anyone interested enough to read her poetry.
If that isn’t your gift, what is?
Not all of us have a plan when we set out. We discover it along the way. The plan evolves, sometimes seems to have a mind of its own. We can see it in retrospect. It can take us places we never expected, ideally to places that please us.
Or maybe you had a plan but life had other plans, better, we hope, than the one you had in mind. But if you ended up somewhere you don’t want to be, what is the plan from here on out? Even if you have lived the majority of your life already, how will you live what’s left?
It is never too late to live the rest of your life. What else could you be doing? The first step is recognizing how precious life is and paying attention to how well you fit in the world and how well the world fits you — and maybe spending more time lying in the grass and strolling through the fields. It worked for Mary Oliver.
If paying attention is a form of prayer, will your prayer be answered? So that, when your living is over, looking back, you will have an answer to Mary’s question:
“This is what I did with my one wild and precious life.”