A New Path: Wild and Winding

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

For so long I didn’t know how to be idle, and I certainly didn’t feel blessed.

My life was a frantic effort to control my body, my circumstances, my future.

I imagine I might’ve read this poem in my dark, hungry times and thought “I can’t go strolling through fields! I have to workout and finish studying. I have to make something of myself.”

I may even have looked on peaceful field-strollers like Mary Oliver with judgment: “How can you spend time doing nothing when there is so much suffering in the world? This heartless world where children starve, ecosystems are destroyed and the manifest destiny machine rolls ever outward crushing our precious planet in its myopic attempt to ‘civilize’ the world?”

While Ms. Oliver was using her wild and precious life to experience beauty and share it with others, I was at war with my body, had my heart’s yearnings gagged and bound, and felt painfully envious of people who seemed to be living with ease.

Of course I saw the world as inhospitable and cruel because that’s exactly how I was living. I sacrificed my love of painting, animals, cooking, poetry and nature for an identity as a high-achieving Science Major, safe from judgment of society because I was going to contribute. I was toeing the line, checking all the boxes everyone said were safe choices, smart choices, responsible choices.

And I burned out.

When the safe path splits into a deep crevasse beneath your feet, what do you do? When you’ve prayed for help daily and nightly and receive no succor, what do you do? When none of your stratagems work anymore, what do you do?

You lay down in the grass. You surrender all your certainty, and in the release of all you carried, you begin to feel idle and blessed,

and once the tears subside and the breeze cools your face, you can see a new path before you.

One of healing and of love. Wild and winding.