"A SONG OF MYSELF"

 “A SONG OF MYSELF”

My 79th birthday (November 27) falls on Thanksgiving Day this year – I was born on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 1946 in Methodist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and though I grew up in Arkansas, the city of Memphis was always the urban area to which I related.  So, I’m celebrating myself and my life this week, and I love using the line from Walt Whitman’s poem as the title of the blog.

If you’ve read my semi-memoir “She Made a Way: Mother and Me in a Deep South World,” you’ll know my story.  If you haven’t read it, get it somewhere and read it and let me know what you think.  Many people have found it profound and provocative, and have found it to be an invitation for them to enter into reflections about their own journeys.  Short summary – I was raised by a single mom in a white, male supremacist world, and while I drank in the kool-aid of racism and sexism and homophobia and militarism, my mother and others helped to shape me in a different way.  Thanks to my mother and to many others, I’ve had several conversions which have enabled me to move towards a sense of liberation from many of those captivities which I breathed in as a child (to use the Apostle Paul’s powerful image from Ephesians 2).  That captivity is so deep, however, that I am afraid that I always stand in the need of more conversions.  I give thanks for my life and for all those who have loved me, challenged me, comforted me, delighted me, and stayed with me – THANK YOU!

I want to close with a Mary Oliver poem, but before I do, in this Thanksgiving week, I must simply add a feeling of disgust and revulsion at the Trumpster’s and the Republicans’ use of SNAP and food benefits as a negotiating tool in the struggle over the government shutdown.  Though I thought he could no longer shock me, I still must register a fundamental outrage that he would allow people to go hungry in order to win political points.  These first ten months of his reign of terror make me tremble for the remaining 3 years – or at least the one year before the Democrats regain control of Congress.

And now on the poem “Summer Day” by Mary Oliver.  The poem is a familiar one to many of us, but it also reminds me of the great gift of life and the call from God to be grateful and to share that gratitude with others.

“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