"EARTH DAY"

 ‘EARTH DAY’

On this Earth Day weekend, I am up in cold and gray weather in northern Michigan, near the shore of Lake Michigan.  We came up to hear our granddaughter Zoe perform in a concert at Interlocken Academy for the Arts, where she is spending her first academic year.  Susan also came over, so we have also enjoyed the mini-family reunion.

Perhaps it is the “winter” weather up here at the end of April that makes me think of a very familiar yet still powerful poem by Mary Oliver: “The Summer Day.” It has also come to mind and heart because Earth Day, officially started in 1970, calls to us loudly about the climate crisis.  Oliver’s poem speaks to us about the attitude that we must seek to develop in our hearts about our relationship to nature and the earth, if we want to take on the climate crisis in earnest – which obviously we must do if we want our grandchildren like Zoe and Emma to have a life.  Find yourself in Oliver’s poem and then decide what you will do with your one wild and precious life.

“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

“House of Light”, 1990