Centering Thought of the Week from Mary Oliver

Each Sunday, our minister publishes a Centering Thought of the Day in the bulletin. I try to focus on the thought for the week. The photograph is of a hay field behind Barton Mountain in Vermont. It is illustrative of the places where I find meditation easiest.

The centering thought for this week is:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The line is from The Summer Day by Mary Oliver. Poetry 180 writes that this poem "holds that the act of attention is a form of prayer." Paying attention to the needs and hopes of others is vital in our lives. Paying attention to nature brings us closer to God.

I hope you find the poem valuable.
May you have a peaceful and attentive week.

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?

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