Sunny Daze: Mary Oliver Reminds Me
A lot of my day is spent looking at my daughter, being naptrapped (a phrase Emily introduced me to and which is now my state of being for approximately 60% of the day) and listening to her breathe.
In the morning, I put her on my chest and I feel the heat of her. Occasionally some impulse to leave or do something rises—to go be productive or what not.
This morning when that rose, I thought of the poet queen Mary Oliver and her beautiful tribute to presence and life, in her poem The Summer Day.
As the urge to go take a shower, or bake some bread, or set up a charging station, pecked at my brain, I looked down at Sunny’s face and thought “Really? I think there’s something better to do than this?”
In Oliver’s poem, after she tells us about the grasshopper she’s watching, she says it thus:
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 (fade)* at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—
As for me and Sunny, there’s no place else to be. We’re in a bubble with one another, getting to know each other, looking into each other’s eyes, sticking our tongues out at one another. There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be than listening to her raspy tiny breath.
*Ive edited the poem here.