A Week Away

I spent this past week back home in Wisconsin, attending a friend’s wedding, soaking in the forests of my childhood, and walking the beaches of beautiful Door County.

This poem, The Summer Day by Mary Oliver, sums up the feeling of the last week:

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?

As the official summer months draw to a close, I have also been considering this from artist Georgia O’Keeffe, written in a letter to Russel Vernon Hunter:

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”