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On my garden path, February 2010
This Life
Perhaps it will be on your walk
to the mail box
on a grey morning
when the sky is a tarp, synched down
at the corners.
Or perhaps
savoring your first sip of coffee
as you look out into the forest
at the weeping boughs of hemlock,
reassuring and languid.
Or perhaps
it is when you drive toward work
on a rainy morning, negotiating traffic
trapped in the tributary of unbounded and glistening
ruby annulets.
Or perhaps
it is when you watch
in the evening lamplight
your son reading, captivated
by worlds that are still in his dreams.
Or is it
when you sit fretful at your desk
balancing your checkbook
–just one more time–
praying for a better outcome.
Or perhaps
it is when you walk, so briskly
on the way to something
assuredly essential,
that you see, out of the corner of your eye
a splash of sunshine against the backdrop
of an aged and mossy stump
where the ‘tete-a-tete’ narcissus
shine, delighted and undaunted.
Perhaps. It is on a day
just like this very ordinary day,
when you realize, with a start,
that this. . .
this is life.
Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
4 Comments
>“One has to be in the same place every day, watch the dawn from the same house, hear the same birds awake each morning, to realize how inexhaustibly rich and different is sameness.” Taoist, Chuang Tzu
>Love your poem and the Chuang Tzu quote. These are my beliefs exactly. I suppose I came to this early as I grew up on a beach, quite literally, and it was always different and always magical, and the waves and the gulls spoke, and the sun blessed every morning. Clams gurgled up through sand and everything was delight and sometimes raw and often messy and definitely miraculous.
>It reminds me of another quote. Mirabel Osler (author of my favorite book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos) observed, "Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality, are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens, why not in our own." (The Garden Bench)
It is all the more true when you consider our place–our little slice, be it beach or mountain or forest or urban on this planet–as our "garden."
>Yes.
;)